Crimes And Mercies By James Bacque (1997)

CRIMES
&

MERCIES

by James Bacque (1997)

The Fate of German Civilians

under Allied Occupation

1944 - 1950

See CONTENTS on page 17

• A brave book which ferrets out one of the war's least welcome secrets. [It]
provokes bewilderment, anger and dismay.

-JULIAN BARNES

• I was wrong to dismiss this book unseen as a pack of revisionist lies. In fact,
the author has conducted painstaking and valuable research, and revealed
much about the conduct of senior American and French leaders which is un-
flattering.

- Daily Mail

• A grim masterpiece of investigative journalism, unmasking one of the most
successful cover-ups in modern history.

- Independent on Sunday

A comment on "Crimes and Mercies"
by G. Miller, placed Sept. 3, 2002 on Amazon.com :

An extraordinary book. It tells two of the most extra-ordinary
stories of the 20th century simultaneously. Neither has been
told before. One is the story of a great hero - Herbert Hoover,
not J. Edgar the FBI boss, but a multimillionaire humanita-
rian whose courage, outspokenness, persistence and dedication
saved literally tens of millions of people from starvation after
the First World War and then after the Second, even more,
many more people. And it's the story of why we never hear
about this. General Eisenhower, war 'hero' and later US presi-
dent, of whom we have all heard, persued a deliberate policy
of preventing the available food aid to come into Germany in
the years between 1945-49. Laws preventing emigration tur-
ned the coutry into a prison. As Bacque revealed in his earlier
book 'Other Losses' (from 1989), millions of destitute sol-
diers died in prison camps; further more, Bacque tells the
story of the horrendous suffering of civilians, dying from
starvation. It is a part of living memory that times were extra-
ordinarily hard, but Bacque' s research enables an estimate of
the scale for the first time: at least nine million and probably
more! He has found the documents which trace the decisions
leading to this second holocaust, leading back to Eisenhower
and his advisors. It is a courageous act for a man aged more
than seventy to accuse a war hero and president of being
commiting atrocities. Bacque's thoughts on the collusion are
thought provocing. It's a sign of the times that a book like this
is out of print (a paperback appeared in 2007). Buy it before
it becomes a historical document in itself. Read it and tell
people. It's relevant to today!

* * *

FRONT FLAP

More than nine million Germans died as a result of Allied
starvation and expulsion policies in the first five years after the
Second World War - a total far in excess of the figures actually
reported. That these deaths occurred at all is still being con-
cealed and denied, especially by Western governments.

Following the world-wide success of his earlier book, Other
Losses, which documented the deaths of about one million
Axis prisoners in Allied camps after the war, James Bacque
flew to Moscow to work in the newly opened KGB archives.
The first English-speaking writer to gain access to these files,
he found new proof of the mass deaths of prisoners. He is also
the first writer to publish recently declassified information from
the renowned Hoover Institution in California. Some other
important American papers were specially declassified for this
book.

Under the Morgenthau Plan and its successors, Germans were
prevented from growing sufficient food to feed themselves,
goods were stolen from them at levels far beyond the war
reparations agreed between the Allies, and private charity was
forbidden. And in May 1945, US General Eisenhower - who
had publicly promised to abide by the Geneva Convention -
illegally forbade German civilians to take food to prisoners,
starving to death in American camps. He threatened the death
penalty for anyone found feeding prisoners.

One quarter of the country was annexed, and about fifteen
million people expelled in the largest act of ethnic cleansing
the world has ever known. Over two million of these people
died either on the road or in concentration camps in Poland
and elsewhere. Children were enslaved for years in these
camps, and the majority of them also died.

BACK FLAP

However, while this titanic revenge was taking place, Western
leaders strongly opposed to the betrayal of Christian ideals
were desperately seeking to bring help to the Germans, and as
part of a policy to aid starving people around the world, Her-
bert Hoover, US Secretary of War Robert Patterson, Canadian
Prime Minister Mackenzie King and his assistant Norman
Robertson together created the largest chanty in history, a food-
aid program that saved hundreds of millions of lives around the
world during three years of struggle against famine. Never
before had such revenge been known; never before had such
compassion been shown. Crimes and Mercies is the extra-
ordinary story of what happened to these people and why:
a book that rips the mask from a suppressed atrocity, and
exposes our breathtaking capacity for kindness and cruelty.

JAMES BACQUE is a former book editor and
reporter. He is now a successful novelist and
lives in Toronto. It was in 1986, while researching
a book on Raoul Laporterie, a French Resistance
hero, that he stumbled on evidence of Allied death-
camps. Other Losses, his highly acclaimed investi-
gation into the deaths of German prisoners of war
after 1945, was the product of that discovery.
Crimes and Mercies, which expands upon this
earlier book, is his third work of non-fiction.

EXCERPTS FROM
CRIMES AND MERCIES

References to pages relate to those in the book itself

pp. xxi-xxii, p. 131 : "The Allied Armies that landed in
Europe in 1944 were the first armies in history that
were organized for mercy as well as victory. They were
ordered to defeat the enemy, liberate the oppressed and
feed the hungry. Within two years of victory, 800 mil-
lion people around the world had been saved from famine,
chiefly by Americans and Canadians, but helped by
Argentinians, Britons and Australians. This was a mercy
that came too late for many millions of Germans. As the
Allies brought freedom to Hitler's slaves, they witnes-
sed in the concentration camps scenes of horror such as
Europeans and North Americans had scarcely seen before.
The sight of these pitiful victims meant that the Ger-
mans were denied a share in the relief that was already
on its way to the rest of the world. Thus for several
years, the Allies wreaked vengeance on the Germans such
as the world had never seen. A whole nation was conver-
ted to a starvation prison. At least 8 million civilians
died (in the first years) after the war, plus about 1.5
million prisoners of war."

p. xxiii : "The struggle has been presented to us as a
struggle between 'their' evil and 'our' good. But as
Solzhenitsyn wrote: 'The line dividing good and evil
cuts through the heart of every human being.'"

p. xxiii : "Having made false gods, we have made a god
of falsity. It the truth will set us free, we must first
set free the truth."

pp. 24-25 : "Western planning for vengeance against Ger-
mans and for the destruction of Germany began in England
in August 1944, with its chief architects Morgenthau and
Dwight D. Eisenhower. The birth of the plan was witnes-
sed by one of Morgenthau ' s aides, Fred Smith, who wrote:
«« On August 7, 1944 at approximately 12:35 P.M. in a
tent in southern England, the Morgenthau Plan was born.

Actually, it was General Dwight D. Eisenhower who laun-
ched the project. ... The subject first came up at lunch
in General Eisenhower's mess tent. Secretary Morgenthau,
Assistant to the Secretary Harry D. White and I were
there. White spoke of Germany, which was now certain to
be defeated. . . . White said: 'What I think is that we
should give the entire German economy an opportunity to
settle down before we do anything about it.' Here Eisen-
hower became grim and made the statement that actually
sparked the German hardship plan. [Smith notes here that
'This material is taken from notes made directly after
the meeting.'] He said: 'I am not interested in the Ger-
man economy and personally would not like to bolster it
if that will make it any easier for the Germans.' He
said he thought the Germans had punishment coming to
them: The ringleaders and the SS troops should be given
the death penalty without question, but punishment
should not end there . ' » »

He felt the people [emphasis in the original] were
guilty of supporting the regime and that made them a
party to the entire German project, and he personally
would like to ' see things made good and hard for them
for a while'. He pointed out that talk of letting Ger-
many off easy after taking care of the top people came
from those who feared Russia and wanted to strengthen
Germany as a potential bulwark against any desires Rus-
sia might someday have...

The General declared he saw no purpose in treating
a 'paranoid' gently, and the 'whole German population is
a synthetic paranoid. All their life the people have
been taught to be paranoid in their actions and thoughts
and they have to be snapped out of it. The only way to
do that is to be good and hard on them. I certainly see
no point in olstering their economy or taking any other
steps to help them. ' White remarked: 'We may want to
quote you on the problem of handling the German people. '
Eisenhower replied that he could be quoted. He said: 'I
will tell the President myself, if necessary. '

Lord Keynes, the famous British economist, asked
President Roosevelt in late November if he was planning
'a complete agrarian economy' for Germany. Although the
American people had been told that the Morgenthau Plan
had been abandoned, Roosevelt now told Keynes in secret
that the plan would be implemented. The German economy
would be reduced to a level ' not quite ' completely agra-
rian, he said. The plan went 'pretty far' in de-indus-
trializing the Ruhr and eliminating many of Germany's
basic industries."

p. 27 : "The Morgenthau Plan has three remarkable
aspects: that it was devised, that it was implemented
after it had been cancelled, and that it has since been
covered up so well. Now it has shrunk from sight in the
West. The basic idea of the plan was to wreck or confis-
cate all important German industry, converting the coun-
try into a huge farm, while at the same time destroying
the fertilizer plans on which German agriculture depen-
ded. It would also cut Germany into pieces and allot a
huge piece of territory to the Poles and Soviets."

p. 30-31 : "The public was fooled time and again into
believing that the Morgenthau Plan had been abandoned
when it had not; that there was a fatal world food shor-
tage, when world food supplies were down by only 2 to
10%; that there was a shipping shortage when scores of
ships lay idle at wharves in North America and Europe.
After Senator William Langer of North Dakota explained
in grim words in the Senate what kind of punishment was
inflicted on Germany, the Senate accepted on March 29,
1946 a resolution that stated in part: 'Whereas ...
reports reaching the United States indicate that . . . the
policies of the victor powers are subjecting millions to
mass starvation, and whereas the United States has been
a party to the commitments and agreements reached among
the victor powers which have led to these conditions;
and whereas the Congress has been bypassed and the
American people have been ignored in the formulation and
implementation of these policies, and whereas it is
essential that the Congress of the United States should
obtain the necessary information to enact legislation
and to request the President to take executive action
designed to eliminate the starvation conditions resul-
ting from the policies from which this Government is
directly responsible, Therefore, be it resolved...' Yet
things remained as they were."

p. 32 : The influential Senator Kenneth Wherry said:

"The truth is that there are thousands upon thou-
sands of tons of military rations in our surplus
stockpiles that have been spoiling right in the
midst of starving polulations. " But it was to no
avail. The allied powers continued their policy of
mass starvation of the German citizens as a cruel
retribution for their presumed collective guilt,
whereas al the other enemy countries, like Japan
and Italy, benefited from generous aid, once they
had surrendered."

pp. 37-39 : "As the situation in Germany had grown worse
and worse, various senators visiting the American zone
discussed the situation with army officers. They also
received letters and reports from American civilians and
officers on the scene. Soon they were informed, and dis-
gusted. Just after Christmas 1945, they met and discus-
sed what to do. It was decided to call on the President
himself. This they did on 8 January 1946. They made a
personal appeal to him to take immediate steps to permit
the American people to relieve the suffering directly.
They particularly requested that the United States raise
the ration allowed to Germans and restore mail and pac-
kage services to the American zone. The sort of language
Truman heard was also audible in the Senate a few days
later, in the voice of Senator Wherry: 'The American
people should know once and for all that as a result of
this government's official policy they are being made
the unwilling accomplices in the crime of mass starva-
tion. . . . Germany is the only nation where UNRRA is not
permitted to feed its nationals. Germany is the only
nation subjected to a deliberate starvation policy of
1,500 calories per day.' This was fresh in Truman's mind
when he finally wrote to Hoover in January 1946 and
asked him to do something about food relief in Europe
and round the world, except for Germany. Once again,
Hoover agreed.

While Hoover began to make his preparations for
the 1946 world tour which would eventually save hundreds
of millions of lives, the senators kept the pot boiling.
Senator Wherry quoted at length from an editorial in the
Christian Century to help him express his feelings.
Calling it 'one of the most angry and inspired editori-
als on this whole tragic subject', he read the whole
last paragraph for the Congressional Record of the
Senate. 'There is not a day to be lost. ... With every
day the opportunity grows less to make real to the
people of Germany the Christian testimony to mercy and
brotherhood. With every day that Christian love is
thwarted by shortsighted and vengeful government poli-
cies, the prospect for a future catastrophe grows. It is
time that a united demand went up from all American
churches and church organizations for an end to the
armed barriers which now keep Christian charity from our
late enemies . It is time to let Washington know that
American Christians will no longer acquiesce in the
Potsdam outrage. '

A few weeks later, on 29 March 1946, Senator Lang-
er had received new information which caused him to rise
again in the Senate, to speak as follows: '[We] are
caught in what has now unfolded as a savage and fana-
tical plot to destroy the German people by visiting on
them a punishment in kind for the atrocities of their
leaders. Not only have the leaders of this plot permit-
ted the whole world situation to get . . . out of hand . . .
But their determination to destroy the German people and
the German Nation, no matter what the consequences to
our own moral principles, to our leadership in world
affairs, to our Christian faith, to our allies, or to
the whole future peace of the world, has become a world
scandal. ... We have all seen the grim pictures of the
piled-up bodies uncovered by the American and British
armies, and our hearts have been wrung with pity at the
sight of such emaciation — reducing adults and even lit-
tle children to mere skeletons. Yet now, to our utter
horror, we discover that our own policies have merely
spread those same conditions even more widely . . . among
our former enemies . '

The senators spoke with deep feeling, at great
length. Side by side with the hatred of evil so vigo-
rously expressed was a moving pity for the miserable
victims. Clearly, without such compassion there could
hardly be the hatred of the evil-doing, which brought
hot shame to the cheeks of Langer, Gollancz and all the
others. In this pity, of course, there is nothing new:
it is as old as victims."

p. 60 : "General Louis Buisson, Director of the War Pri-
sons, said that food rations were "Just enough to allow
a man to lie down, not move, and not die too quickly. In
spite of the certain fate awaiting German prisoners of
war in French hands, this government continues to be a
party to sentencing German oprisoners of war to starva-
tion in contued violation of the articles of war of the
Geneva Convention." (Quote by Senator William Langer
mentioned in his speech in the Senate of 29 March 1946)

p. 62 : The American army officers kept their secrets
and did not inform the politicians. If they made reports
or memos about the deplorable conditions, like Colonel
Lauben, who defined the Vosges "as just one big death
camp", these were put on file, to be discovered only
some forty years later when the archives became acces-
sible.

p. 73 : George Orwell's dizzying paradox: "What the
people knew was not true, what was true was not known
(but well hidden in archives)."

pp. 79-80 : "The British lodged in the public mind the
conviction that the nefarious Soviets were reponsible
for deaths that had actually occurred in the camps of
Britain's friends, France and America. ... The Western
Allies had taken around 73% of the total prisoner catch,
of whom they had so far recorded only around 24,000
dead. They were accusting the Soviets of 99% of the
purported deaths (or 'missing')."

p. 91 : "Even as the gallows at Nuremberg displayed
their awful warning, the Allies were depriving men,
women and children in Germany of available food. Foreign
relief agencies were prevented from sending food from
abroad; Red Cross food trains were sent back to Switzer-
land; all foreign governments were denied permission to
send food to German civilians; fertilizer production was
sharply reduced; and food was conficated during the
first year, especially in the French zone. The fishing
fleet was kept in port while people starved. British
soldiers actually blew up one fishing boat in front of
the eyes of astonished Germans. 'The people say the sea
is full of fish, but they want to starve us', said Bur-
gomaster Petersen. For several years after the Allied
conquest, the Germans subsisted on less food than the
Dutch in the hungriest time (the hunger winter of
1944) ."

p. 113 : "There were three main locales for death for
Germans after the surrender. The first was in the POW
camps, the second among the expellees at home or on the
road from their former homes to occupied Germany, the
third among residents of occupied Germany. Of course,
many Germans from the seized territories who evaded ex-
pulsion died as well, but figures for them are not avai-
lable."

p. 131 : "At least 9.3 million (and perhaps 13,7 mil-
lion) Germans died needlessly soon after the war, the
great majority because of the conditons imposed by the
four major victors. This is many more Germans than died
in battle, air raids and concentration camps during the
war. Millions of these people slowly starved to death in
front of the victors' eyes every day for years. These
deaths have never been honestly reported by either the

Allies or the German government." These monstruous fi-
gures include (p. 30) "some 5.7 million German civilian
residents of Germany who died, in between October 1946
en September 1950, but were not reported to have died.
Although most of these people died from lack of food,
their deaths were not caused by the world food shortage
described by some historians. They began dying when
world food production was 97 % of normal. They were for
a considerable time prevented from receiving charitable
help, and from earning their own bread. They went on dy-
ing while world food production climbed ever higher."

pp. 132-133 : "Why hide these millions of civilian
deaths, since historical theory, if it pays any atten-
tion at all, attributes them to consequences of Nazi
policies? The cover-up alone shows that the Allies have
to this day a very uneasy conscience on the subject.
Clearly the military camouflaged all this as best they
could because they knew their reputations would be da-
maged if the truth came out . Love of reputation is a
minor guarantor of good behaviour but a great source of
hypocrisy in any society. The cover-up illustrates an-
other feature: that the perpetrators of the crimes were
in profound conflict with people in the West who saw a
much better solution than vengeance - like Hoover, Gol-
lancz, Senators Langer and Wherry, along with Dorothy
Thompson, thousands of nameless aid workers and a very
few honest reporters. Theirs was the conflict between
crime and mercy - or good and evil if you will. Many
people representing the West in Germany were deeply
distressed at what they saw. People such as Murphy and
Behnke reveal in their uneasy words their uneasy con-
science. Many such people were quite prepared to hang a
Nazi, but it was repugnant to them to starve his child
to death without a trial . "

p. 135 : "Two characteristics distinguished the victors
of 1945 from nearly all others in modern European histo-
ry. One is that they refused to allow the vanquished any
treaty at surrender. Everything was imposed. The other
was that they did not end the killing at the end of the
war, but increased it. Above all, what was expected of
the Allies, even by their own people, was to end the
killing. But in fact, far more civilian Germans died in
five years of 'peace' than soldiers in six years of war.
As we have seen, at the Nuremberg trials of the German
war criminals, the Soviets saw an opportunity to pin the
blame for the Katyn massacre on German scapegoats, to
hang them and have done with it. But their case was so

patently bogus that the Western Allies objected. All the
Allied lawyers and judges knew perfectly well that the
Germans were not guilty, but not one of them told the
truth: that the only other nation that could have com-
mitted the crime was the USSR."

p. 141 : "All this is scarcely known to the major parti-
cipants. A whole nation was maimed in peacetime, but
when the events are even mentioned by the German sur-
vivors, they are immediately hushed up by their own go-
vernment. No one is allowed to dig for the corpses of
the murdered prisoners in Germany. 67 The criminals go
free. To defend them, lies are told by historians who
also defame the injured. Free expression of historical
opinion is curbed by legislation that grows ever more
stringent as time passes. No denial of history has ever
been so successful. Never was any other nation so for-
cibly estranged from itself and from its own past. Which
goes for the democracies too."

p. 154 : "Many of the Allies in the summer of 1945 had
no intention of imposing mass starvation on Germany. A
Canadian on Eisenhower's staff, Lt. Gen. A. E. Grasett,
was asked to report on the wheat situation, and wrote in
June 1945 to his chiefs at SHAEF that 'the wheat that
will be arriving should be adequate to prevent starva-
tion', among the German civil population. Much wheat was
sent to Germany intended for relief of German civilians.
But many people in high places, from Morgenthau down,
were determined to impose a harsh vengeance on Germany
in the guise of preventing a resurgence of German power.
This would be easier to carry out if the public believed
that there was a world food shortage from 1946 on. Yet,
the statistics of world food production do not bear out
the official history at all."

pp. 157-158 : "Food production and food imports came un-
der specific attack when the fishing fleet was prevented
from going to sea for a year, and the Western Allies
drastically cut the production of fertilizer. By false
accounting, the Allies also refused to credit the value
of some German exports to the German account, making it
impossible for Germans to earn foreign currency to buy
food. Baldly stated, many valuable goods were stolen,
beyond the reparations agreed among the Allies. All
foreign governments and international relief agencies,
including UNRRA and the Red Cross, were prevented from
assisting Germans for the first critical year. By the
time such pacifist organizations as the Mennonites of

Canada were permitted to send food to their co-religio-
nists in Germany, in June 1946, the overall death rate
in Germany had risen to more than double the normal
rate. So much food was confiscated by the invaders that
the ICRC was moved to complain in August 1945. The ICRC
had over 1,000 boxcars and 400 trucks actually shipping
relief food into Germany despite war damage in the
spring of 1945. At least three trains reached Ravens-
burg, Augsburg and Moosburg, but were refused permission
to unload by the Allies, who sent them back with their
food to Switzerland. From there, the Red Cross returned
the food to the original donors . An exception to the
general rule appears to have been the arrival in Lbbeck
in autumn 1945 of three Swedish ships loaded with relief
supplies intended for Germans. It is not clear, however,
that the supplies were actually distributed to Germans.

As a result of the seizures of land and the expul-
sions in the east by Poland and the USSR, about twelve
million starving, penniless refugees poured into the
remainder of Germany. In the British zone between Janu-
ary 1946 and January 1947, more than 1,700,000 of these
helpless people were imposed on the twenty million ori-
ginal inhabitants. Such were the avertable calamities in
the three Western zones that created the situation
Hoover was trying to correct.

Despite all the catastrophes of war, despite the
loss of food from the seized lands and the loss of the
food production of the Soviet-occupied zone, in the
spring of 1945 the western Germans had at least a hope
of maintaining themselves without any imports. If the
Allies had not impeded them, there can hardly be any
doubt that they would have found a way to feed them-
selves a meagre diet on their own land. Many lives would
have been saved."

pp. 166-167 : "The Allies set up various agencies to
'control' relief into Germany, but clearly a large part
of their purpose was not to control but to eliminate
relief. One Quaker said: 'The US Army made it difficult
for relief. This is a forgiving understatement conside-
ring that they were physically barred for a whole year
when the starvation was most acute. As we have seen,
thousands of truckloads of supplies from Switzerland,
Sweden and Ireland were refused entry in 1945 and 1946.
A few were sneaked in illegally simply through the bene-
volence of the local Allied commander. The Swiss Relief
Fund started a private charity to feed a meagre meal
once a day to a thousand Bavarian children for a couple
of months. As soon as the US zone occupation authorities

discovered what was going on, they 'decided that the
aid ... should not at once be accepted'. The army
informed the ICRC that 'public opinion in the US would
not allow' private charity to go to Germany. They
offered no evidence for this. All the evidence of the
elected representatives of the people of the US, in the
speeches of Senators Wherry, Langer and others, had
shown just the opposite. While the local army officers
were telling this lie to the Swiss, Secretary of War
Patterson, in charge of that very army was, as we have
seen, working as hard as he could to get food to Ger-
mans . And in the UK ' even the concept of voluntary aid
via food parcels from Britain's civilians was anathema
to Whitehall' in October 1945. Such aid to Germans was
forbidden. "

ie ie ie

LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY (CANADA) LIMITED Boston

New York • Toronto • London

First published in Great Britain in 1997
by Little, Brown and Company

This Canadian Edition published
by Little, Brown and Company (Canada) Limited in 1997

148 Yorkville Avenue
Toronto, ON MSRK

Copyright © 1997 by James Bacque

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrie-
val system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permis-
sion in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding
or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition in-
cluding this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Bacque, James, 1929 —

Crimes and Mercies

ISBN 316 64070

To Herbert Hoover

and

Reverend John F. Davidson

Herbert Hoover

CONTENTS

Excerpts p. 5

List of Illustrations p. 18

Foreword by Dr Alfred de Zayas p. 23

Introduction p. 29

CH 1 A Piratical State - p. 34

CH 2 The Beginning of Wisdom? - p. 47

CH 3 'From There No Prisoner Returned' - p. 69

CH 4 A Holiday in Hell - p. 87

CH 5 And the Churches Flew Black Flags - p. 109

CH 6 Death and Transfiguration - p. 128

CH 7 The Victory of the Merciful - p. 154

CH8 History of Forgetting - p. 189

Appendices - p. 203
Notes - p. 225

Select Bibliography - p. 266
Index - p. 274

List of Illustrations

References to pages relate to those in the book itself

p. XXVlll

Map showing the division and control of Germany immediately
after the Second World War. Source: The Oder-Neisse Problem
by Friedrich von Wilpert (Bonn, Atlantic-Forum, 1962).

p. xxix

Map showing the expulsion of Germans from their eastern
homelands. Source: The Oder-Neisse Problem by Friedrich von
Wilpert (Bonn, Atlantic-Forum, 1962).

p. 42-3

German local governments were ordered by the US Army to
warn citizens that feeding prisoners was a crime punishable by
death. This order was found in the 1980s in the archives of the
village of Langenlonsheim by Jakob Zacher.

p. 98-9

Printed notice for Germans to be expelled from Kraslice, in the
Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia. Source: Sudetendeutsches Bild-
archiv, Munich.

p. 127

This memorandum by Robert Murphy, Chief Political adviser
to US Military Governor of Germany from 1945, was kept
secret until the 1990s. Murphy predicts an excess of deaths
over births of at least 2,000,000. Source: Hoover Institution,
Stanford.

Plate section

1. Henry Morgenthau, US Secretary of the Treasury. His
Morgenthau Plan for the destruction of German industry
led to the deaths of millions of Germans years after the
war's end. (US Army)

2. The Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, where
the transfers of millions of Germans from Poland, Czecho-
slovakia and Hungary were approved. Truman is in the
foreground, with his back to camera; Stalin is seated fur-
ther to the right and Churchill is across the table on the
left. (US Army)

3. US President Harry Truman (left) greets Herbert Hoover
on 28 May 1945, before a 45-minute meeting during which
they discussed world food relief. (Acme Inter-
national/Bettman Archive)

4. In September 1945, US Secretary of War Robert Patterson
and President Harry Truman controlled the most powerful
military machine in human history. They soon used it for a
huge food-relief campaign. (US Library of Congress)

5. Norman Robertson, Under-Secretary of External Affairs
for Canada, led the Canadian food aid programme from
1945. Later he became Ambassador to the United States.
(Herb Nott / Ontario Archive)

6. William Lyon Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada.
He worked with Norman Robertson and Herbert Hoover to
bring Canadian wheat to starving people around the world.
(Gilbert Milne/Ontario Archive)

7. Painting by prisoner Kurt Spillman of the French camp at
Thorae-les-Pins, near La Flnche, in early spring 1945. 'We
arrived about 6 A.M. in a snowstorm. The dead lying on the

right are comrades who suffocated during the journey. US
soldiers look on as we are beaten by the French support
troops.' (Kurt Spillman)

8. US Army camp at Sinzig, on the Rhine near Remagen,
spring 1945. Millions of Axis prisoners were herded into
open fields and kept for months without sufficient food,
water or shelter. (US Army)

9. Aerial view of the infamous Russian camp at Vorkuta,
two thousand miles north-east of Moscow, between the
Barents Sea and the northern peaks of the Urals. (Hoover
Institution)

10. On these tiny pages (shown actual size) the names of dead
Austrian prisoners were written. Rudolf Haberfellner (now

of Toronto) risked his life to smuggle this notebook out of
his camp at Novo Troitsk, USSR. (Rudolf Haberfellner)

1 1 . The Allies deprived Germany of chemical fertilizers, so
this farmer near Bamburg uses liquid manure. The cows
drawing the wooden tanks also provided milk and, when
too old to work, meat for the hungry. (US Army)

12. April 1946: German engineers are forced to dismantle
a power-plant at Gendorf for shipment to Russia as repara-
tions. (US Army)

13. January 1946: civilians in Kiel clean up rubble in front
of the Empire Building used by the British for their Army
Welfare Service. (Gerhard Garms)

14. Demonstration in Kiel against the excessive Allied regu-
lations, which helped cause food shortages in 1947. Signs
read: 'We demand control over food distribution'; 'Severe
punishment for black marketeers'; 'We demand sufficient
food for all'; and 'End dismantling. We want to work'.
(Gerhard Garms)

15. Hamburg, 1946: a barefoot German boy scavenges for
food. (Gollancz Archive, University of Warwick)

16. The British philanthropist and publisher Victor Gollancz
denounced Allied crimes in passionate prose. He is seen
here during his 1946 visit to Dusseldorf, in the British zone.
(Gollancz Archive, University of Warwick)

17. A British nurse in Berlin helps three German refugee
children expelled from an orphanage in Danzig, Poland. The
boy on the left, aged nine, weighs 40 lbs and is too weak to
stand. The boy in the centre, aged twelve, weighs just 46 lbs,
and his eight-year-old sister, right, weighs 37 lbs. This picture
was first published in Time magazine on 12 November 1945.
(Black Star / Time magazine)

18. Seven starving babies in the Catholic children's hospital
in Berlin, October 1947. The infant on the right is near death.
(US Army)

19. Canadian poster asking for contributions to help save
the lives of children in Germany, undated but probably from
1947. (National Archives of Canada)

20. In 1946 Mrs Hugh Champion de Crespigny, centre, wife
of the British Regional Commissioner of Schleswig-Holstein,
helps with the Christmas celebrations of refugee children in
the convalescent home established in a wing of their official
residence in Kiel. (Gerhard Garms)

21. Children emerge from ruins. Many families in wrecked
German cities lived in damp, unheated basements for years
after the war. (Alfred de Zayas)

22. Expellees from the east, who left home with few supplies
and little or no transport, pass US Army vehicles. (Internatio-
nal News)

23. Displaced women and children move slowly in horse-
drawn carts and on foot along the road near Wurzen. (US
Army)

24. Bunk-beds and makeshift furniture in a crowded barracks
for refugees, Germany, 1946. (International Committee of the
Red Cross)

25. The first food parcel allowed to be sent from the USA
arrived in Berlin at the home of Heinz Lietz on 14 August
1946. Many Germans starved to death when such readily
available help was denied. (US Army)

26. The original handwritten caption to this photograph reads:
'Bread, the "staff of life" in Berlin. — Thanks to the providence
of God and the Dutch Red Cross which brought MCC [Menno-
nite Central Committee] flour and other nice food to the Men-
nonite refugees in Berlin. 1 (Peter Dyck)

27. An old refugee woman gathers sticks to help cook meagre
meals supplied in part by Mennonites from Canada and the
USA. (Peter Dyck)

28. Mennonite Peter Dyck, from North America, helps a young
expellee boy from the east. (Peter Dyck)

29. American Cornelius Dyck, the first member of the Menno-
nite Central Committee to enter the British zone in late 1946.
The Committee provided invaluable help distributing food
packages in Schleswig-Holstein, where the population
increased by over 70% after the arrival of expellees and
refugees. (Gerhard Garms)

30. A German child's picture of the world, drawn in about
1948, shows the route of 'Hoover food' by train from
Canada, the US and Mexico and then across the Atlantic to
Hamburg. (Hoover Institution)

* * *

FOREWORD

Injustice has been with us since time immemorial, and will
persist for as long as mankind exists. Two thousand years ago
the Romans noted a thought that even then was a platitude:
homo homini lupus. Man is indeed a wolf to other men.

The seventeenth century experienced the 'Thirty Years' War'
(1618 - '48) with its incredible massacres of the civilian popula-
tion. In Germany alone, one-third of the population perished in
the name of religion. But Europe had seen many other genocides,
fratricidal wars and natural disasters. We remember the
Albigensian Crusade of the thirteenth century, launched by Pope
Innocent III in 1209 against the Manichaean heretics of southern
France, during which entire cities were exterminated in the name
of the 'true faith' (over 20,000 men, women and children were
slaughtered in Beziers alone), accompanied by the establishment
of the Inquisition, the widespread practice of torture to obtain
confessions and/or recantations, and culminating in innumerable
butcheries of recalcitrant heretics and the 'Bucher de Montsegur'
in 1248, where more than 200 leaders of the Cathar hierarchy
were burned at the stake.

War, famine and pestilence have also punished the twentieth
century. Indeed, the two so-called World Wars of the first half of
the century could very well be called our 'thirty years' war',
beginning in 1914 with the murder of the Austrian heir to the
throne in Sarajevo and ending with the atomic bombs over
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

James Bacque gives us an account of crimes and mercies in
the twentieth century. How have we lived up to our democratic
principles, to our Judeo-Christian values of love, solidarity and
forgiveness? Bacque shows us that, in war as in peace, suffering
is personal, not collective. He shows us the dreadful statistics of
the calamities inflicted by the victors on the Germans after the
Second World War, but he asks us to personalize that pain, to

see that behind statistics there is flesh and blood, lest we too
become as indifferent as statistics.

The facts are so horrifying that they are hard to comprehend.
The work I have done myself in The German Expellees and
Nemesis at Potsdam revealed the horrifying statistics behind the
mass expulsions of fifteen million Germans from the Eastern
Provinces and the Sudetenland into the Occupied Zones in 1945-
50. At least 2.1 million are known to have died. Chancellor
Adenauer himself wrote in his memoirs that six million of them
died. And the (West) German government under Adenauer in
1950 determined that 1.4 million prisoners of war had never
returned to their homes. 1 They are missing to this day. Bacque
revealed what had happened to them in his book Other Losses
(1989). And now he uncovers evidence that as many as five
million Germans may have starved to death while under Allied
government after the war. These figures are so shocking that he
has sent the whole manuscript to a world-famous epidemiologist,
whom I met when he was working in Geneva as a special
consultant to the World Health Organization. He is Dr Anthony
B. Miller, Head of the Department of Preventive Medicine and
Biostatistics at the University of Toronto. Miller has read the
whole work, including the documents, and checked the statistics,
which, he says, 'confirm the validity of [Bacque's] calculations and
show that slightly more than five million deaths of German civilians
occurred in Germany as a whole during the post-war period through
to the census of 1950, over and above the reported deaths. These
deaths appear to have resulted, directly or indirectly, from the semi-
starvation food rations that were all that were available to the
majority of the German population during this time period.'

After the fall of the communists, Bacque visited the KGB archives
in Moscow where he found further evidence of the startling death
figures in Other Losses. Those archives contain documents revea-
ling some of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, committed
by the Soviets. It is remarkable that such evidence was not imme-
diately destroyed, but carefully preserved instead. As the Russian
historian Dmitri Volkogonov has written in his book, Lenin: 'Lenin
was not moved to halt the crime against men and women aged be-
tween fourteen and seventeen, and merely wrote "For the archives"
on the document, thus establishing the tradition that no matter how

callous, cruel and immoral an act of the regime might be, it would
be recorded and stored in the archives for a history that would never
be written as long as that regime lasted.' 2 Now Bacque has used
those documents, along with others newly declassified in the
Hoover Institute Archives in Stanford and the Library of Congress,
to determine the fate of the majority of German civilians who were
neither expellees nor prisoners of war. The most important of these
papers belonged to a man I knew and admired, Robert Murphy, a
sound, decent, warmhearted American who was the diplomatic
representative of the US government attached to the American
military government in Germany from 1945 onwards. Ambassador
Murphy witnessed and deplored the vengeance inflicted on
Germany under JCS 1067, the chief American directive on occu-
pation policy pursuant to the purportedly abandoned Morgenthau
Plan. In this section of the papers, which, so far as Bacque can
determine, is published here for the first time, Murphy wrote in
1947 that 'owing to the present high death rate in Germany', the
population would shrink by two million in the next two or three
years. The evidence of that population shrinkage is clearly
revealed in the two censusses of 1946 and 1950.

This fate is a reminder not only of the vengeance that awaits the
crimes of the totalitarians, but of the way the totalitarian view can,
like a virus, infect the body politic even in a democracy. Much of
what Bacque tells us is new or very little known in the English-
speaking world. Even the reasonably well-informed will be amazed
to read about such disturbing facts as the deliberate continuation
of the food blockade against Germany and Austria for eight
months after the signing of the armistice of 1 1 November 1918,
a blockade that cost an estimated one million lives needlessly.
They will wonder whether in 1945 it was necessary and justifiable,
in the light of the principle of self-determination of peoples, to
deny fifteen million Germans the right to live in their homelands
and to subject them to a form of 'ethnic cleansing', first forcing
them to flee, then expelling them in a way that caused millions
more deaths after the end of hostilities - deaths that were in the
name of 'peace'.

Professional historians will probably demur and insist that of
course they know all about these events. The reader, however, is
allowed to ask why, if they do know, have they not written about

it? Why have they failed to inform the public? Why have they
not attempted to place these events in perspective, compare them
to other wars and massacres?

In its core, Bacque's book poses fundamental human-rights
questions that must be answered. He writes about the sufferings
of German, Austrian, Japanese and other victims - and why not?
Indeed, human-rights principles are tested not on the 'consensus'
victims or on 'politically correct' victims, but rather on unpopular
individuals and peoples. It is frequently the controversial cases,
where hardly anyone wants to recognize the persons in question
as victims, that allow us to vindicate the universal imperative of
respect for human dignity, the dignitas humana. At this juncture
it is important to stress that Bacque is just as keenly aware of,
and sensitive to, the sufferings of victims of German and
Japanese aggression. They deserve our respect and compassion.
Yet Bacque is persuaded that there are other 'unsung victims'
who must not be forgotten.

Readers may react with a sense of discomfort at Bacque's revela-
tions, for a variety of reasons. First, because these grotesque crimes
were committed in the name of the virtuous democracies, the United
Kingdom, the United States, France and Canada. Secondly, because
we hardly know about these crimes. Thirdly, because the victims
have been consistently ignored and have received neither compas-
sion nor compensation. Fourthly, because the intellectual establish-
ment, the universities and the press have failed to come to grips
with the implications of these events.

Of course the defeated Central Powers in the Great War and the
Axis powers in the Second World War committed many horren-
dous crimes. Some of these crimes were the subject of prosecution,
at the Leipzig Trials of 1921-22, at the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46
(and twelve additional Nuremberg Trials under Control Council Law
No. 10), and at the Tokyo Trial of 1946-48. Tens of thousands of
war criminals have been convicted, and several thousand have been
executed. Justice, however, demands respect for the presumption
of innocence of the accused, and for rigorous observance of due-
process guarantees in determining individual guilt. No one should
be subjected to arbitrary or discriminatory treatment on the basis
of guilt by association. Individual responsibility must always be

established on the basis of credible evidence; and individual
actions must be judged in the proper historical and political
context - not in the light of subsequent events and/or knowledge
which cannot be attributed or imputed to the accused. The concept
of collective guilt is repugnant to human dignity and unworthy
of any system of justice.

Still, it is this concept of collective guilt that has hitherto
characterized and pervaded the approach of historians and jour-
nalists to the issues raised by Bacque. Because the Germans are
perceived as collectively guilty, they somehow have no rights.
Only a few voices have been raised to acknowledge the injustices
perpetrated by us and our allies over so many decades. Only a few
courageous individuals like Herbert Hoover, George Bell and
Victor Gollancz have dared to remind us of the moral dilemma.
Indeed, how could we go to war in the name of democracy and
self-determination and then betray our own principles in the
peace settlement? More concretely, how could we go to war
against Hitler's methods only to apply similar methods during
and after the war?

Bacque's chapter on the flight and expulsion of the Germans
at the end of the war gives us much food for reflection. In this
context it is worth recalling what the British publisher and phil-
anthropist Victor Gollancz concluded in his book Our Threate-
ned Values: 'If the conscience of men ever again becomes
sensitive, these expulsions will be remembered to the undying
shame of all who committed or connived at them . . . The
Germans were expelled, not just with an absence of over-nice
consideration, but with the very maximum of brutality.' 3

Surely the inhuman treatment of Germans by ostensibly com-
passionate Americans and Britons constitutes one of the many
anomalies of the twentieth century. And yet very few persons
outside Germany are aware of such discriminatory, undemo-
cratic, infrahuman treatment. Ask anyone whether he has ever
heard of the ethnic cleansing of fifteen million eastern Germans.
Besides the enormous cultural and economic consequences of
this demographic revolution in the very heart of Europe, the
phenomenon of compulsory population transfers raises many
questions that go beyond the purely German experience, since

the right to live in one's homeland, the right to remain in one's
home, and the right of refugees to return to their homes, is one
of the most fundamental human rights that require affirmation
and vindication.

On 26 August 1994, the United Nations Sub-Commission on
Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities
adopted resolution 24/1994, which reaffirms this right to remain
and right to return. It is not difficult for the reader of this book to
apply this resolution to some of the events described here by
Bacque.

Let us hope that many more Canadian, American, British and
other historians and journalists will take these matters seriously
and devote to them the attention they deserve. Especially now
with the opening of the archives of the former Soviet Union and
of the former communist states of Eastern Europe, it is to be
expected that important new revelations will come to light.
Bacque has already taken advantage of the new opportunity and
conducted research in the Moscow archives. Let us also hope
that Russian, Polish and Czech historians will take this oppor-
tunity to come to grips with aspects of their own history that
hitherto could not be researched.

We owe James Bacque our recognition for his courage to
raise new and uncomfortable questions. We thank him for the
answers he proposes. Let the debate begin.

ALIFIREB BE SAY AS

Member of the New York Bar

Visiting Professor of International Law,
Chicago J. D. Harvard Law School

Dr Phil. (History)

University of Girttingen, Germany

Geneva, November 1994

INTRODUCTION

This book is my attempt to understand how we in the West in
the twentieth century ignored peaceful wisdom in pursuit of
victorious folly; how we often idolised the worldly worst among
us while we ignored the kindly best; how in beating the devil, we
imitated his behaviour; and how despite all this, there were those
among us who steadfastly spoke from conscience and ever acted
from mercy to save our victims, and thus to save ourselves.

The Allied Armies that landed in Europe in 1944 were the
first armies in history that were organized for mercy as well as
victory. They were ordered to defeat the enemy, liberate the
oppressed and feed the hungry. Within two years of victory, 800
million people around the world had been saved from famine,
chiefly by Americans and Canadians, but helped by
Argentinians, Britons and Australians.

This was a mercy that came too late for many millions of
Germans. As the Allies brought freedom to Hitler's slaves, they
witnessed in the concentration camps scenes of horror such as
Europeans and North Americans had scarcely seen before. The
sight of these pitiful victims meant that the Germans were denied
a share in the relief that was already on its way to the rest of the
world. Thus, for several years, the Allies wreaked a vengeance
on the Germans such as the world had never seen. A whole
nation was converted to a starvation prison. At least 7 million
civilians died after the war, plus about 1.5 million prisoners of
war.

Here was the outline of a moral struggle so vast it defied
definition. This seemed to me to be the same struggle between
good and evil that had gone on in the mind of Jesus Christ, as he
stood on a hillside in the desert and was tempted by the devil; it
was the struggle between the devil and Faust for Faust's soul.

The struggle is without end of course, but there are discernible
stages in its development in the twentieth century. The first be-
gins with the criminal folly of the First World War from 1914 to
1918, ending with the failure of the Treaty of Trianon (or Treaty
of Versailles). Through all this time, many humanitarians, led
by Herbert Hoover, saved many hundreds of millions of lives.
After Versailles, many leaders of the Western democracies did
their best to mitigate some of the horrors of war with disarma-
ment conferences, reparations forgiveness, naval agreements,
humanitarian treaties and capitulations, to the point of timidly
appeasing the tyrant Hitler. Neither Hitler nor his ally Stalin was
mollified, and the war that followed was the worst ever known.
Not until years after the Second World War did the vast gene-
rosity and wise forbearance of the Western democracies begin
to overtake the criminality to which they had been dragged by
the tyrants. Under Hoover, Harry Truman, Mackenzie King,
George Marshall and Clement Attlee, the Western democracies
brought peace, prosperity and order to a despairing world.
Simultaneous with the thousand crimes committed in the demo-
cracies' name since 1945, there has been a steady brightening
of their civilizing genius. In freeing colonies, forgiving enemies,
in arms control, the voluntary limiting of client-wars, in world
health measures, food production, international law, human
rights and hundreds of other ways, the Western democracies
have shown this genius. The same spirit was clear in heroes
like Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak in the Soviet Union,
who led the effort to empty the Gulag and eventually freed the
Russian people with very little bloodshed.

The struggle has been presented to us as a struggle between
'their' evil and 'our' good. But as Solzhenitsyn wrote: 'The line
dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human
being.' The struggle between the criminals and the merciful is so
enormous and lengthy that I have only touched on a few of the
outstanding events, mostly in the West. These seemed to me
interesting because concealed, and instructive because unfore-
seen. In these Western democracies the ideals of self-determi-
nation, mercy towards the vanquished and freedom of speech,
were thought to be highly regarded and strongly protected.
These ideals have often been betrayed, a process which is
going on to this day.

Another astonishment for me was to discover the disparity
between our warm approval of ourselves, and the evidence.
This is not because the actions which manifest our collective
virtue are absent; it is rather that we attribute virtues to those
who do not possess them. We have followed heroic leaders into
disastrous wars while we have largely ignored the people who
acted from kindness or wrote the truth. Having made false gods,
we have made a god of falsity. If the truth will set us free, we
must first set free the truth.

I owe my warm thanks first to Elisabeth Bacque, who has read
and translated German, French and Italian for this book, as well
as my own hieroglyphics, always with a cool eye to the major
point: the fundamental decency of the men and women who
made up our armies, and armies of mercy, in Europe after 1945.
To Alfred de Zayas, a good friend, brilliant historian and scho-
lar, the book owes more than I can say. He has contributed
knowledge, balance, caution and lots of original material, as well
as his persuasive Foreword. To Paul Boytinck, friend, guide and
expert researcher, I owe wonderful research material of every
kind, plus manifold leads to obscure journals and books in four
languages. And the same is true of Colonel Dr Ernest Fisher,
who has never stinted in his help or good advice. To Martin
Reesink, I owe many thanks for the expert research he did and
helped me to do in the archives of the Red Army and KGB, plus
some wonderful dinners and hilarious rambles and drives around
Moscow in 1992 and 1993. Andrei Kashirin and Alexander
Bystritsky prepared the thoroughgoing Spravka for me, covering
all the essential points of the treatment and statistics of prisoners
of war in the USSR. Captain V. P. Galitski of Moscow gave
generously of his time and knowledge on the same subjects. For
supporting me through a lot of thick and some thin, thanks to
John Fraser, a gutsy friend, fine editor and so-so baseline player.
And thanks also to that dogged researcher, E. B. Walker of
Birmingham.

Once again, my friend Dr Anthony Miller took much time
from a busy schedule to read, appraise, criticize, and re-read the
manuscript, giving each statistical section the benefit of his
broad epidemiological knowledge. Thanks to John Bemrose, for
warm friendship, good counsel and good editorial advice. To

Professor Angelo Codevilla of Stanford University, many thanks
for tough advice and great hospitality in the visiting scholar's
condominium at Stanford. I have profited greatly once again
from discussions with Peter Hoffman, and from the guidance of
Jack Granatstein, Josef Skvorecky and Pierre van den Berghe.
Their sharp editing kept me from many an error. I was moved to
tears by the kindly, deeply- felt letter of appraisal from Professor
Otto Kimminich of Regensburg. Thanks as well to Professor
Desmond Morton for supporting me to the Canada Council, and
to the Canada Council itself for a timely grant which helped me
go to Moscow and Stanford. Paul Tuerr and Paul Weigel of
Kitchener have both helped me, especially with the organization
of a conference at Massey College in Toronto to which many
scholars came in spring 1996, to give papers on various aspects
of the Allied occupation of Germany in 1945-50. Along with
them, Karen Manion, Siegfried Fischer and Chris Klein helped
to carry that burden.

To Ute and Wolfgang Spietz, vielen Dank. To Professor Hart-
mut Froeschle, Peter Dyck, Dr Gabriele Stbber and to Professor
Richard Mbller, thanks for advice and help. And to dear Annette
Roser, who has taken up the cause and made it her own, as well
as to Dr Ter-Nedden of Bonn, to Annaliese Barbara Baum, and
especially Lotte Bu;rgmann, friend and guide, whom I feel I
know well though I have met her but once - besten Dank.

Alan Samson, my editor at Little, Brown in London, took the
courageous decision to publish this book despite the harsh
opposition it is bound to arouse. And then he and Andrew
Gordon gave very effective advice on improving the manus-
cript.

Toronto, April 1997

The quality of mercy is not strain' d,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath: it is twice bless'd;

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes

The throned monarch better than his crown;

His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,

The attribute to awe and majesty,

Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;

But mercy is above this sceptred sway,

It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,

It is an attribute to God himself;

And earthly power doth then show likest God's

When mercy seasons justice.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The Merchant of Venice, iv. i. 179-192

CHAPTER 1

A Piratical State

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhis-
toric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as
they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived
faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.

GEORGE ELIOT, MIDDLEMARCH

During the century before 1914, the Western democracies began
a series of reforms such as the world had never witnessed. All of
them abolished cruel institutions - duelling, slavery, religious
discrimination and child labour. In Ontario, the first universal,
free, mandatory, long-term education system in the history of
the world was begun and perfected within forty years. In the US
and UK, cures for diseases were discovered, electricity made
useful, aeroplanes invented and hunger abolished among mil-
lions of people. All the democracies began the process of
electoral reform that brought the polling booths to everyone by
1925. 1 In agriculture, industry and science, advances were made
that produced prosperity for the great majority of their citizens,
something that had never happened before. The democracies did
these things under no threat from enemies, nor to surpass other
societies. These things occurred because there was a civilizing
genius among the people based on their ancient beliefs.

The rapid improvement of life that seemed inevitable in 1900
was slowed to a walk by the catastrophes of the twentieth
century. These were prefigured largely in the century before.
Darwin, Marx and Freud had all invented new beliefs for man-
kind, which had in common the idea that people must forever
struggle against each other. In society, class must fight class;
in the natural world, individual must compete against indivi-
dual; and within the individual mind ego must war with libido,
or instinct with learned behaviour.

These ideas ignored the fact that the very definition of society
is people co-operating to a greater good. Co-operation and trust
alone enabled societies to survive, but ideas such as permanent
class warfare, the Oedipus complex and survival of the fittest
created conflict and mistrust in personal relations, political revo-
lutions, wars between nations and eugenics programs which
were a major part of the social catastrophes of this century.

The nineteenth-century spirit of generous reform in England,
Canada, France and the US continued into the twentieth century.
But now the powers of the state were being vastly extended by
the reformers themselves in order to implement their generous
ideals. Under the fascists and communists, the reforming pas-
sions were taken over by the state. They animated the state
and were controlled by it. In the brilliant phrase of the philoso-
pher Michael Polanyi, 'The generous passions of our age could
now covertly explode inside the engines of a pitiless machinery
of violence. 1 2

What saved the democracies from the fate of the others were,
largely, traditions deriving from the Protestant Reformation that
previously had expressed and limited the faith of people in a
central power, whether church, feudal monarchy or modern state.
The people had already freed their individual consciences from
the priests, aristocrats and bureaucrats who had controlled them
through a vast machinery of patronizing moral condescension,
the class system, hypocritical imputations of basic guilt, recipro-
cal loyalties and violence.

Totalitarianism was far stronger in Italy, Spain and Russia,
where the Protestant revolution had not occurred, or where it
had been curtailed by the older authoritarian traditions, as in
Germany. Among the particular traditions that protected the
democracies were freedom of conscience, expressed as freedom
of speech; mass literacy; habeas corpus; the extended franchise;
and the various other constitutional protections of individual
rights all proceeding largely from the Reformation and the
Enlightenment. That these traditions did not always guide the
foreign policies of the democracies was clear to see in Ireland
and in the American west. But by far the most spectacular
failures were in Europe, after the German wars.

Two men struggled for the soul of the West in London during
the First World War. They were Winston Leonard Spencer
Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, the very model of the
arrogant, conservative power of the British Empire, and Herbert
Hoover. Churchill was then prosecuting a sea blockade, intended
to strangle the German war effort but also starving millions of
Belgian children. This deeply offended Hoover, an obscure
mining engineer from Iowa, then living in London. He was
typical of the reforming, generous, independent spirit of many
Americans opposed to Empire and big government, with a naive
faith in the goodness of the United States.

Hoover began trying to get permission from the British govern-
ment to ship food from Canada and the US through the blockade
to Belgium. Churchill refused. The Germans, having occupied
Belgium and northern France, were responsible for feeding the
people, he said. Any food imported into Belgium would relieve
some of the pressure that the blockade was exerting on the
Germans.

Hoover's bullying moralizing soon got him into serious trouble
with Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1915.
Hoover had asked Asquith to release to his control 20,000 tons of
Canadian flour stockpiled in England. He wanted this for seven
million people 'surrounded by 'a ring of steel and utterly unable
by any conceivable effort to save themselves'. As Hoover himself
admitted, it was with 'some abruptness' that he told Asquith that
the Belgians were starving because of the British blockade, yet the
British claimed to be fighting to save Belgium. He said he was not
begging for the Canadian flour, but asking permission to buy it. If
he were to leave the meeting without the flour, he would be forced
to make this public, and the American public, sympathetic to Great
Britain, would be disgusted. Asquith remarked that it was not cus-
tomary for him to be addressed in such a tone. Hoover immediate-
ly apologized, saying that he was moved by the anticipation of
emotions that must come from a negative reply on Asquith's part. 3

In January 1915, Hoover persuaded several more of the highest
leaders of Britain to consider his proposals. After Asquith he met
Lord Grey, Foreign Secretary, and Lloyd George, Chancellor of the
Exchequer. Receiving encouragement, he went to Berlin to see to

the German side of the arrangement, where he dealt with people
he found 'automatic and inhuman'. 4 But they agreed to coope-
rate, so he went back to London to find Churchill in alliance with
Lord Kitchener, organizing opposition to all relief regardless of
the widespread starvation in Belgium, now spreading to occupied
France.

Churchill was so annoyed at Hoover's enterprise that he actually
went to the Foreign Office to file charges of corruption against
Hoover, alleging that he was spying for the Germans. Grey
referred the charges to a Judge of King's bench; Hoover was not
only exonerated but eulogized by the judge. 5

For years Hoover struggled against Churchill, until finally, with
Churchill discredited and out of office after the bloody failure
at Gallipoli, Hoover was granted the extraordinary privilege of
addressing the British War Cabinet to explain a proposal for
which he alone was responsible - breaking the blockade. 6

That Hoover should have been invited to address a British War
Cabinet meeting was in itself astounding. The war was at a
critical stage, the Allies were losing, and what Hoover was
proposing could not decide the war. But the Allies had been
saying that they were fighting the war for the very ideals Hoover
was defending. The Germans were largely indifferent to the fate
of the Belgians whose country they had invaded and were now
occupying, but that did not justify the Allies in neglecting
Belgium's starving civilians. Mutinous French troops were being
urged to keep battling against a barbarous enemy who was now
said to burn libraries and make sport of spearing Belgian babies
on their bayonets. With Hoover, the British ministers were
arguing about the whole point of the war as it had been adver-
tised to their troops.

According to David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister who
succeeded Asquith and who was a most eloquent man himself,
Hoover's talk was 'virtually the clearest exposition he had ever
heard on any subject'. Hoover stood before the Cabinet table on
18 April 1917, one hand in his pocket, the other gesturing
slightly as 'he spoke flawlessly, with not a word too few or too
many'. 7 He said that the Allies were in the war to preserve the

rights of small democracies such as Belgium. Victory would be
empty if many Belgians starved to death because of the Allied
blockade. He begged the ministers to show a magnanimity that
would outlast all the bitterness of this war 1 . Two years before,
Lloyd George had agreed with Hoover following a meeting with
senior British officials, exclaiming, 'I am convinced. You have
my permission. 1 8 Now in Cabinet in 1917, he declared himself
persuaded again.

The reasons that Hoover advanced for saving the Belgians were
known in those days as 'sentimental 1 , because they were thought
to originate in trivial emotions found mainly in the 'weaker sex'.
For many aggressive empire -builders like Churchill, to act on
them was 'ill-advised'. Hoover observed that Churchill believed
that the 'incidental starvation of women and children was justi-
fied if it contributed to the earlier ending of the war by victory'.
9 The whole Belgian relief program was 'indeed full of senti-
ment', as Hoover said. j_0 But the Cabinet turned the sentiment
to cash for Hoover, pledging not only passage for the ships,
but also the substantial sum of one million pounds per month
in donations to the 'Hoover Fund', jj. Secretly, the French
government also put up money for Hoover's relief ships. 12

The triumph belonged not to Hoover alone: he had dozens of
devoted helpers, who obeyed his instructions to the letter and
cheerfully nicknamed him 'Chief The Commission for Relief in
Belgium was 'a piratical state organized for benevolence' accor-
ding to one British official. The Commission had its own flag, a
fleet of ships, and its own communications system; it negotiated
agreements like treaties with European states, it raised and spent
huge sums of money, it sent emissaries across battle-lines with
what amounted to a passport, and when the members thought
they might be spied upon, they communicated in their own
private language or code: American slang. ' 13

Without realizing it, Hoover had more or less invented the idea
of universal 'human rights'. This idea, so familiar to us, was un-
known round that Cabinet table, 14 although an act ex gratia to
save lives was not rejected unless it was tinged with bolshevism
or impinged on some imperial interest.

That was one stage in the birth of a great saviour. Hoover was
a wealthy man with a fascinating career when war broke out.
But the Quaker faith of his Canadian mother and American
father made him immediately sympathetic to the North Ame-
ricans stranded in Europe by the outbreak of war in 1914.
Hoover abandoned his profitable business to pour his money
and organizing skills into arranging transportation, loans, visas,
permits, communications and lodging for the many Americans -
still then at peace - who wanted to get out of Europe. In those
few weeks of 1914, a passion was born in Hoover that never
failed him, or the starving millions who later turned to him when
everyone else had failed.

Next came the Poles. They asked him for help to bring in food
after the invasion by Germany in 1914. Hoover set up a
committee of generous Americans, including many expert on
the Polish situation. They collected money and goods, made
arrangements for foreign credits and for foreign governments
to permit the supplies to travel, and then they sent them.

Hoover proved himself so reliable, energetic, honest, discreet,
well-organized, imaginative, common-sensible and well-inten-
tioned during this and the Belgian relief campaigns, that by
1918 the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, was
relying on him not only to organize food and relief but also for
advice on the political consequences of relief. For instance, after
the end of the First World War, millions of Russian prisoners
were still in prison camps in Germany. Until the Treaty of Brest-
Litovsk ended the Russo-German war in 1918, the Russians had
also held many German prisoners. Both sides treated the priso-
ners relatively well so long as this hostage system was in effect,
but with the return of the German prisoners under the Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk, the system collapsed, and the Russians still impri-
soned in Germany began to starve. After the Armistice ended
the fighting in the west in November 1918, the Allies kept up
their sea blockade which deprived the Germans both of food
imported by sea and of the Cleans to earn cash by overseas
trade to buy food. Now German women and children began to
starve, which was the purpose of the Western Allies, who wan-
ted to keep up the pressure on the Germans to sign a peace

treaty. It mattered not at all to the Western Allies that the Ger-
mans had signed the Armistice on the basis of Wilson's '14
Points' proposal, which included cessation of the blockade.
The '14 Points' were supposed to be the framework of the even-
tual peace treaty, so the Paris Peace Conference, which Hoover
attended along with Wilson, should have merely worked out
details which had already been agreed in principle with the
Germans. But the blockade went on.

This was why the Russian prisoners began to starve, while the
Allies wondered what to do about them. If they fed them, they
were taking the pressure off the Germans. If the prisoners were
allowed to return to Russia, they might be induced or pressed
into the Red Army, which terrified the Western Allies. If the
Allies did nothing, the men would die, long after the fighting
had ended.

Hoover wrote to President Wilson in February 1919 to suggest
a plan that might get round a legal restriction on American aid
to the Russian prisoners, who were by then starving to death
'wholesale, by neglect', as Hoover said. J_5 Because his relief
funds were restricted by American law to charity, and because
the subject of aid to the prisoners was already assigned to the
Red Cross and the holding power (the nation imprisoning the
soldiers) under international convention, it was not strictly legal
for Hoover to send American aid. But Hoover pointed out to
the President that the object of taking care of the prisoners 'is to
prevent them going back to Russia in the middle of the winter
and joining in the Bolshevik army, and therefore is solely a
military purpose'. He wondered if it might be the duty of the
American army to furnish supplies to save them from both
starvation and bolshevism - in Hoover's mind, the two were
synonymous. The army had plenty of supplies, its communica-
tions were essential to their distribution, and no questions would
be asked if the decision were taken. The food went and the lives
were saved. This was the first in a long series of American mer-
cies extended to the Soviets, despite their avowed purpose to
overthrow American capitalism by violence.

Hoover did not help communists because he approved of their
politics, but because it was wise. He was certain that commu-

nism was so stupid that it would 'fall of its own weight 1 . In the
meantime, he could demonstrate the vast superiority of capitalist
democracy while preserving the lives of those who would soon
see the light. Soon after the war he travelled around the USA
raising money at lightning speed. He raised over one million
dollars (about $15-20 million in 1997) in one evening from some
of America's richest men, who paid $1,000 per plate to hear him
speak while they stared at the dinner of rice and potatoes that was
all the children of Poland could expect for that whole day. He
was mainly responsible for persuading the government to give
Poland over $159,000,000 in grants and loans, which equals
around two and a half to three billion dollars today. In 1920,
the American Relief Administration (ARA), staffed largely by
volunteers working for little or no pay, was feeding over one
million Polish children every day at 7,650 stations. Hoover
managed this with a minimum of government help, and great
popular support. As he told US Secretary of War Robert Patter-
son in 1946, there was such popular approval for his measures
in 1919 that there was no need to threaten the American people
with the spectre of German food riots. In 1919 and in 1946, the
popular reaction was the same: feed the starving. And Hoover
was prepared to satisfy their desire.

When Hoover visited Poland in 1919, some 30,000 children
paraded across a grassy sports field in Warsaw to cheer him.
They came with the very tin cups and pannikins from which
they had had their special meal of the day . . . thanks to the
charity of America organized and directed by Hoover, and
they carried their little paper napkins, stamped with the flag of
the United States, which they could wave over their heads . . .
These thousands of restored children marched in happy never-
ending files past the grandstand where sat the man who had
saved them . . . They marched and marched and cheered and
cheered . . . until suddenly an astonished rabbit leaped out of
the grass and started down the track. And then five thousand
of those children broke the ranks and dashed madly after him
shouting and laughing . . ,' 16

Watching beside Hoover stood the head of the French Mission,
General Henrys, a tough soldier who had survived the First
World War, 'with tears coursing down his face until finally, over-

come, he left the stand. He said to Hoover in parting, "II n'y a
eu une revue d'honneur des soldats en toute histoire queje
voudrais avoir plus que cette qu 'est vous donnee aujourd'hui. "
["There has never been a review of honour in all history which I
would prefer for myself to that which has been given you today."]
Hoover himself wept for joy before that young crowd. 17

In the work Hoover attacked so vigorously, and with such huge
success, we see foreshadowed many of the problems that have
beset us to this day. The vengeful Treaty of Versailles peace
terms, which he wished to make more reasonable, led directly to
the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler; the
racial conflicts among Serbians, Bosnians and Croats that preci-
pitated the First World War continue in 1997; the cruelties and
failures of Soviet Russia are only just ending; and the commu-
nism that triumphed in China in 1949 continues to blight mil-
lions of lives. Furthermore, the allegations of anti-Semitism in
Eastern Europe foreshadowed Hitler and the fate of the European
Jews, right down to reports of 'a holocaust ... in which six mil-
lion human beings [Jews] are being whirled towards the grave
by a cruel and relentless fate 1 . J_8 When he heard these reports of
attacks on Jews in 1919, Hoover advised President Wilson to
appoint a committee of investigation. Among the members recom-
mended by Hoover was Henry C. Morgenthau, son of a US diplo-
mat and philanthropist, and later Secretary of the Treasury, who
helped prepare the report to Wilson 'exposing falsity and creating
a generally more wholesome atmosphere'. J_9

Hoover dealt with all these problems, foresaw the consequences
and accurately predicted the outcomes. On the prime threat to
Europe, bolshevism, he was particularly acute. In March 1919
he told the President, '. . . the Bolshevik has resorted to terror,
bloodshed and murder to a degree long since abandoned even
amongst reactionary tyrants. He has even to a greater degree relied
upon criminal instinct to support his doctrines than even autocracy
did. By enveloping into his doctrine the cry of the helpless and
downtrodden, he has embraced a large degree of emotionalism and
has thereby given an impulse to his propaganda comparable only
to the impulse of large spiritual movements ... I have no fear of
their propaganda in the United States.'

Bolshevist propaganda did not move him because he knew
that the system had inherent defects which would destroy it
without any outside pressure. He told Wilson that, 'Sooner or
later the Bolshevik government will fall of its own weight or it
will have swung sufficiently [to the] right to be absorbed in a
properly representative government. 1 20 Hoover advocated 'large
financial and moral support of the Allied governments' to help
establish a new government'. 21 In every detail of his analysis of
the Bolshevik problem and of its future, Hoover was absolutely
correct; his prediction has come true to the letter. Only Stalinist
cruelties such as the world had never imagined, the failure of
Christian Russians to resist and the mistakes of the Europeans
and North Americans kept the regime in power decades longer
than Hoover anticipated.

He saw the world's hope in his own country. He told Wilson
that 'It grows upon me daily that the United States is the one
great moral reserve in the world today and that we cannot main-
tain that independence of action through which this reserve is to
be maintained if we allow ourselves to be dragged into detailed
European entanglements over a period of years. In my view, if
the Allies can not be brought to adopt peace on the basis of the
14 Points, we should retire from Europe lock, stock and barrel,
and we should lend to the whole world our economic and
moral strength, or the world will swim in a sea of misery and
disaster worse than the dark ages . . .' 22

On Germany he was darkly prescient: 'The blockade should be
taken off . . . these people should be allowed to return to pro-
duction not only to save themselves from starvation and misery
but that there should be awakened in them some resolution for
continued National life . . . the people are simply in a state of
moral collapse . . . We have for the last month held that it is
now too late to save the situation.' 23

In the midst of terrific pressure to bring food to the starving,
when another man might have acted unilaterally to save time,
Hoover scrupulously observed the limits of the rather vague
mandate given him by Woodrow Wilson. Whenever he thought
he was nearing the fringes of his power, he warned Wilson that

he could not cope with the problem he had been given without
further powers. He then pointed out the consequences of inaction
and advised as to the solution. Very often Fresident Wilson took
his advice without checking it with anyone else. He often wrote
on the bottom of Hoover's letters 'Approved, Woodrow Wilson'.
24 According to Henry L. Stimson, who had a brilliant career in
American government in the 1930s and '40s, 'Hoover has the
greatest capacity for assimilating and organizing material of any
man I ever knew.' 25

In all this, Hoover was personally disinterested; in all this he
always saw clearly the interests of the unfortunate and down-
trodden. In all this he was first a humanitarian, without ever
ceasing to be gladly American; in fact, his feeling for the United
States was founded partly on the ability of the United States to
rise above its own preoccupations to succour the world.

Because of his supranational goals, he saved millions of people
while other leaders - especially those at the Paris Peace Confe-
rence - had no idea what to do after the crash except to glue the
wings back on. They believed they were practical, realistic men,
but according to one brilliant British observer at the conference,
A. J. Balfour, the chief Allied leaders were 'three all-powerful,
all-ignorant men sitting there and partitioning continents with
only a child to take notes'. 26 The 'system' they devised was as
crude as a stone axe, truce pinned in place by the threat of
slaughter. It lasted only as long as fear was stronger than resent-
ment. Hoover saw the consequences of their decisions, he des-
cribed them clearly, and he acted successfully on his views,
within his own mandate. He could do so because he saw before
anyone else that in those days, it was in the national interest to
rise above national interest.

In 1923, Hoover received the thanks of three of the highest
officials in Soviet Russia for his relief work. In a letter from the
Kremlin dated 10 July 1923, L. Kamenev, Acting President of
the Council of People's Commissars, and N. Gorbunov and L.
Fotieva, also members, wrote:

Unselfishly, the ARA [American Relief Administration]
came to the aid of the people and organized on a broad scale

the supply and distribution of food products and other articles
of prime necessity.

Due to the enormous and entirely disinterested efforts of
the ARA, millions of people of all ages were saved from
death, and entire districts and even cities were saved from the
horrible catastrophe which threatened them.

Now when the famine is over and the colossal work of the
ARA comes to a close, the Soviet of People's Commissars, in
the name of the millions of people saved and in the name of
all the working people of Soviet Russia and the Federated
Republics, count it a duty to express before the whole world
its deepest thanks to this organization, to its leader, Herbert
Hoover, to its representative in Russia, Colonel Haskell, and
to all its workers, and to declare that the people inhabiting the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics will never forget the help
given them by the American people, through the ARA, seeing
in it a pledge of the future friendship of the two nations. 27

And indeed, that friendship continues today. Seventy years on,
they are still in need of food, and we in the West have joined
with the Americans in sending it to them. Now, in the late 1990s,
we understand that Hoover in 1920 spoke the truth when others
were dumb. In those days so long ago and so different from now,
he was an accurate prophet. Yet he was simply carrying out one
of the basic Christian precepts of Western society, to forgive
your enemy, and do good to those who hurt you. One could say
there was no prescience at all. The ideas of Hoover, as Gandhi
said of his own ideas, are as old as the hills and so endure.

In 1919, Hoover was in Brussels to attend a conference to
present to the Germans a formula he had devised for solving the
blockade problem. A British Admiral, Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, was
the head of the British delegation. He saw Hoover in the hotel
lobby one day, and said brusquely, 'Young man, I don't see why
you Americans want to feed these Germans.' To which Hoover
immediately replied, 'Old man, I don't see why you British want
to starve women and children after they are licked.' 28

From Brussels Hoover went on to Paris, where he helped Presi-
dent Wilson negotiate the details of the German peace treaty.

He was still struggling against his nemesis, Winston Churchill,
who energetically advocated continuation of the blockade in the
House of Commons: 'Germany is very near starvation, 1 Hoover
believed, '. . . [there is] the great danger of a collapse of the entire
structure of German social and national life under the pressure of
hunger and malnutrition. Now is therefore the time to settle. 1 29
Churchill was opposed not only by Hoover and Wilson, but even
by his former ally, Francesco Nitti, Prime Minister of Italy, who
said, 'It will remain forever a terrible precedent in modern history
that against all pledges, all precedents and all traditions, the
representatives of Germany were never even heard; nothing was
left to them but to sign a treaty at a moment when famine and
exhaustion and threat of revolution made it impossible not to
sign it . . .' 30

Hoover protested to the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George,
who immediately criticized Hoover for failing to send in the
food. Hoover let him have it, in 'a torrent that he ought to
remember even in his grave', slamming the British and French
officials who were obstructing his relief work. He told Lloyd
George that hundreds of thousands of tons of food were lying on
the docks at Rotterdam waiting to go up-river to Germany, while
Germans starved. He pointed out that the British navy was even
preventing the German fishing boats from going out to catch
fish.

To the Prime Minister's face, Hoover denounced the 'grasping
attitude of your trickster minions'. As Hoover dryly noted after,
Lloyd George was an over-worked but a reasonable man. 3J_
Lloyd George later quoted Hoover's words in a speech of his
own, demanding that the French in particular cease their ob-
structionism, otherwise they 'would rank with Lenin and Trot-
sky among those who had spread bolshevism in Europe'. 32

Somewhere between half a million and a million Germans
starved to death after the war.

CHAPTER 2

The Beginning of Wisdom?

For Britain, the most important aim of diplomacy in the 1930s
had been to maintain in Europe a balance of power so that no
nation would be strong enough to threaten her interests. In 1939,
Britain hoped to achieve this partly by threatening Germany with
war if Germany attacked Poland. Germany was seen as the only
threat, and Poland was the place to end her aggressions. But, in
fact, Poland was attacked in 1939 by two European aggressors,
Germany and the USSR. Six years later, Poland was free of
Germans, but the USSR was still in ugly possession of eastern
Poland and other territories it had first taken with the help of
Hitler. The British guarantee to Poland had not been fulfilled.
And the Soviet threat to Europe in 1945 was great.

A decision was made in 1945 that shaped modern history. The
last battle of the Second World War was not to be fought. As
the Polish Minister Babinski in Ottawa said to the Prime Minis-
ter of Canada Mackenzie King in July 1945, 'Poland has lost
the war she fought, and the Allies have lost the war . . . Russian
communism has won the day.' I The weakness of the British
vis-a-vis the Soviets is often assumed to be the cause, but the
'weak' British of 1939 had gone to war against Hitler; and in
1940, when they were even weaker, the British had continued
to defy him. Now the victorious British of 1945 were meekly
collaborating in the Soviet takeover of all eastern Europe. Why?

The answer begins with one of the dominant international facts
of the twentieth century, the strength of Germany. The Axis
alliance in 1941-42 seemed so strong that our leaders believed
that it was imperative to ally ourselves wholeheartedly with the
dictator Stalin against the dictator Hitler.

This was one of the more astonishing reversals in history, for the
British, French, Canadians and Americans had all been deadly
enemies of communism since the first days of the Russian Revo-

lution. They had failed to suppress communism in Russia, but
their old enemy Germany had secretly begun to co-operate with
Soviet Russia to re-arm in the 1920s. The Germans under the
Weimar Republic had begun to rebuild their air force and army,
which was illegal under the Treaty of Versailles. In Kazan, Ger-
man tank units under General Heinz Guderian were secretly
trained, and helped to train Red Army units; at Lipetsk airbase
nearby, the Germans tested 'a whole new generation of German
fighters and heavy bombers'. 2 And in August 1939, Germany
and the Soviet Union agreed in a secret protocol to the Molotov-
Ribbentrop pact, to conquer Poland together and then split the
spoils. Assured of a speedy victory in Poland, Hitler courted the
risk that Britain and France would declare war on Germany.
Thus started the Second World War.

Hitler continued the war against the British and French with the
help of the Soviets, who delivered oil, rubber, wheat and strate-
gic metals in return for some machinery and for Hitler's compli-
ance in their takeover of the Baltic states. Thus for almost two
years, the UK and British Commonwealth - with a little help
from France - fought against German armies fuelled and fed in
part by the Soviets.

Desperate for help after the fall of France in 1940 and Hitler's
attack on the USSR in June 1941, the British and Canadians
began to revise public opinion about the tyrannical Soviet
regime. It was clearly ludicrous to pretend that the Soviets were
helping the democracies, but the Western Allies did it anyway,
manufacturing public opinion through their control of press, film
and radio. The major thrust of this propaganda was to demonize
Germany and later Japan, while praising the Russians for their
heroic struggle to defend their homeland. On the June day in
1941 that marked the beginning of Hitler's assault on Russia,
Churchill said with a smile, 'If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at
least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of
Commons.' 3

Pondering how to conduct the war from 1941 on, Western
leaders did not choose the democratic way, to obey the public
will. Instead, having determined their policy in secret, they
deceived the public. They suppressed the brutal truth, that they

believed the West was so weak that they had to support one
criminal regime in order to beat another. So the Western leaders
pretended that the greatest mass-murderer of all time, Joseph
Stalin, was a wise and heroic leader resolutely defending Mother
Russia against the fascist hordes. And it was the democracies'
duty to help defend him.

Soon after Hitler declared war on the USA in December 1941,
the American government, with the willing co-operation of the
press, created a vast propaganda machine to dupe their people
about the Soviets. This was necessary for several reasons, one
being that the American public, even nine months after the
Japanese sneak attack at Pearl Harbor, was still confused as to
why they were in the war at all. According to a Gallup Poll in
September 1942, almost 40% of Americans had no idea 'what
this war was all about'. The pollsters concluded that 'this large
minority of the population has not been adequately sold on
the war'. 4 There was such a widespread indifference or oppo-
sition to government policies that their report had to be marked
confidential, and circulated only among the top echelons of the
media, with recommendations on how to change public opinion
to favour the war.

As the war progressed, the Allies gradually extended their
military co-operation with the Soviets, championing their cause
against all kinds of critics. The mass killer Stalin was pictured in
the Western press with a benign smile over the caption 'Uncle
Joe'. Life Magazine stated unequivocally in 1943 that the Rus-
sians 'look like Americans, dress like Americans and think like
Americans'. The New York Times took the long view, saying
that 'Marxian thinking in Russia is out'. 5 No mention was ever
made of the vast atrocities committed before and during the war
by the Soviets.

Then Roosevelt and Churchill took the next step: they began
to cover up Soviet war crimes against their allies, the Poles.
And finally, after the war, they helped the Soviets commit new
crimes, against the democratic leaders of Poland, and against
former allies of the West. These were White Russians who had
fought first with Western troops against the communists in the
Russian Civil War, then later sided with Hitler against Stalin.

Victory over Germany justified for some people in the West the
totalitarian means that had gained the end, so these people were
sent by force to Stalin, although they had never been Soviet
citizens. Finally, the Western democracies co-operated in the
bloody Soviet-Polish expulsions from eastern Germany, main-
tained camps where about one million German prisoners of
war died of starvation, exposure or disease, and countenanced
or contributed to the starvation of millions of German civilians
from 1946 to 1950.

The influential American columnist Dorothy Thompson clearly
saw and eloquently warned against the danger that Western
democratic leaders would continue to adapt some totalitarian
methods to their own use after the war. She was joined by
Harvard President Conant and many others. Herbert Hoover
condemned the whole process in 1948: 'I felt deeply that . . .
we were aligning ourselves with wicked processes and that the
old biblical injunction that "the wages of sin are death" was
still working. We see the consequences today. 1 6

The democracies accommodated the Soviets in 1945 partly
because they still feared and hated the Germans. The democ-
racies were also indifferent to the Soviets' totalitarian cruelties.
They were co-operating with the Soviets in hiding atrocities in
the east, and in the murderous expulsions from the seized terri-
tories of Germany. But their refusal to fight the Soviets was
more fundamental. A fascinating change had begun that is still
going on in the English-speaking democracies: the peacemakers
were beginning to win their struggle with the militarists.

In most crises in the Anglo-Saxon nations before 1945, the
victors had usually been the militarists. And with good reason,
for Anglo-Saxon military power was by far the most successful
that the world has ever known. Neither England nor the United
States had ever lost a war against non- Anglo- Saxons in over five
centuries of struggles with the greatest military powers on every
continent, in the air, on the sea, under the sea, on land, under
every kind of regime.

After the United States, Britain in 1945 was probably the most
powerful nation on the face of the devastated earth, with the
biggest empire in the history of the world. The Soviets had to
remember that in any confrontation with Britain, huge resources
might be available to Britain from Canada and the USA, who
were able to pour billions of dollars in food, munitions, and
advanced equipment into her ports. The Royal Navy was the
strongest on earth, after the American fleet; the Royal Air Force
enormous and highly skilled; the armies numbering millions of
men, well-equipped and flush with victory.

There was recent and powerful precedent for the British to resist
Russian influence in Europe. Britain had actually sent troops and
ships against Russia twice before in recent times, once against
the Tsar in the Crimea, and once again during the Russian Civil
War. To assist them in a land battle, the British could call on
more than two million German captives in their possession in
the summer of 1945. The warlike spirit was still strong in the
land. Churchill in May 1945 was keeping many German priso-
ners ready for battle, in their original formations, with all their
guns and other equipment intact. 7 For the British of yore, per-
sonified in Churchill, the commitment to Poland would have
been a matter of Britain's national honour, and her ancient pride
- a test of British mettle. To fulfil it by driving out Russia would
have been a stern duty. But the Empire's power depended large-
ly on the willingness of the Canadians and Americans to go on
subsidizing the British. Billions of Canadian dollars had already
been sent, billions more were on their way to shore up the Bri-
tish economy. How long would it last?

Mackenzie King, the grandson of William Lyon Mackenzie,
who had been arrested and jailed for leading a Canadian rebel-
lion against the British in 1837, was opposed to an Empire
dominated by the British. On a visit to Downing Street in Sep-
tember 1945 to receive British petitions for food and money,
he wrote: 'It is strange that Mackenzie [his grandfather] should
have gone to Downing Street to try and get self-government,
Canada's grievances remedied and that Downing Street today
should be asking me to come to help Britain with her difficult
problems.' 8 By King's decision, Canada would not send the
troops Churchill had wanted to help the British reconquer south-

east Asia. But his objections went deeper than that. 'I was thin-
king a day or two ago, that I had first my grandfather's work to
carry on; then Mulock's work, Lauder's work, and now my own
work. All on this one theme, seeking to have the organization
of Empire such that it will hold together by its several supports
rather than all fall asunder through the efforts of Tory imperia-
lists to create a vaster Empire than has been, thereby sowing the
seeds of another world war.' 9

Bankrupt, short of food, weary of war, lacking warlike allies,
the British made no threats against the Russians. Most of the
imperial grandeur was swept overboard like cannon from the
deck of a listing ship. The guarantee to Poland was ignored by
all but the Poles.

The Americans had made no guarantee to Poland, but they felt
strong sympathy for her people, and the politicians were keenly
aware of the large Polish vote in the USA. Herbert Hoover had
toured the US raising millions of dollars for relief to Poland in
both the wars. By March 1945, even Roosevelt, invincibly
credulous about Stalin, was beginning to wonder if the Soviets
had any intention of accepting Anglo-Saxon ideas for sharing
world power, or of making the United Nations work. By Sep-
tember 1945, when the Japanese war was over and the atomic
cloud had spread around the world, no one could doubt that the
Soviets were already breaking all their promises about Poland.
The Western sympathizers in Poland were being arrested and
murdered, the communist Lublin Poles controlled Poland in the
interests of the Soviets.

The Americans now had a strong complaint against the Soviets,
and a strong ally in Britain. They would gain much in other parts
of the world by bringing the Soviets to heel. The Soviets threate-
ned the growing American oil interests in the Middle East; they
were helping Mao Tse-tung in China against the pro-American
Chiang Kai-shek, and communist spies were caught stealing
secrets from the highly advanced Canadian atomic development
programme.

If the British and Americans had issued a joint ultimatum to the
Soviets over Poland, one choice for Stalin would have been war

against the most powerful nations in the world, whose aid was
now essential to the Soviets just to keep the nation from starving.
The USSR, strong compared to Germany, was feeble against the
West. The USSR had huge armies in Europe, but much of their
food came from Canada and the United States. Their soldiers
marched into battle in fifteen million pairs of North American
boots. Over 21,000 of their planes, half a million trucks, 12,000
tanks, and one-third of their merchant shipping fleet, were made
in Great Britain, Canada or the United States. 10 Stalin said in
1943 that 'without this equipment, we would lose this war'. U_
Stalin's train arrived at Berlin for the Potsdam Conference on
Canadian rails; much Russian bread was made from wheat
grown in Canada and the USA. L2 Not only that, but there were
revolts, insurrections and guerrilla movements in several places
in the ramshackle Soviet confederation. There was guerrilla
warfare in Poland and the Baltic countries; an uprising in the
Ukraine; and low-grade protests in the army, in industry and in
the Gulag, the Soviet administrative department responsible for
maintaining prisons and labour camps. Not only did the allies
know the full extent of the supplies the Soviets needed, they
also had a statistical picture of the destruction that the country
had suffered. In February 1945, the US State Department
issued a confidential summary of the state of the Soviet eco-
nomy, under the title 'Outline of Factors Determining Russia's
Interest in American Credits'. The summary showed that the
Allies judged that the Soviets had lost 25% of their stock of
fixed capital (i.e. buildings, dams, roads, equipment, bridges).
The losses in inventory (stocks of food, clothing, etc.) would
add approximately another 6% to that. In all, the Soviets had
lost close to one-third of inventory and equipment, plus mil-
lions of young men. 13.

In addition to the millions of men in their own world-wide
forces, the British and Americans in the summer of 1 945 held
over six million German troops in their camps, while the Soviets
had just over two million. The British and American armies
nearly matched the Soviets in numbers, and they were far better
supplied and more mobile. A lot of the Soviet transport was still
drawn by horses, but the armies of the West were the first in the
history of the world to be propelled entirely by engines. And the
Westerners had the most powerful weapon ever known - the

atomic bomb. Why, with the danger of the Soviets plain to see
in every sphere, did these two victorious powers not stand firm
while they were so superior? For the British, Poland was a mat-
ter of honour; for both British and Americans, Poland was a
useful pretext to deliver an annihilating lesson to the Soviets.
Why did they not do it?

First, there was the fear that Germany might rise from the
wreckage and challenge the democracies again. This fear soon
diminished as the Allies took over in Germany, then finally
disappeared into the antagonism between communism and
democracy. But even more important was the desire in the
democracies to find a better way than war to settle the hostilities
of the world. They had tried once before with the League of
Nations, they would try once again with the UN. But the UN
could not work without the USSR. To bring the Soviets into the
world community of nations - to create that sense of community
in the first place - the democracies sacrificed Eastern Europe,
and Poland, East Germany, and placed their honour and their
power in the balance.

Their policy was partly in Churchill's plan to share power with
the Soviets in Europe, L4 partly a determination to crush Germa-
ny under an occupation so heavy that it could never again threa-
ten the supremacy of the West. It was in the remnants of Wilson's
14 Points; it was partly in Mackenzie King's 'law of peace, work
and health'; and it was partly in the determination of Roosevelt
and other American leaders to 'get along with' the Soviets.

But there were people in the West who believed that the
Second World War was only the crusade against Hitler. Victory
was all, Poland scarcely mattered, the Soviet threat meant little.
After the war, these few powerful people kept the war going
in the form of camouflaged vengeance. On the Western side,
this vengeance was named the Morgenthau Plan after one of
its progenitors, Roosevelt's friend Henry C. Morgenthau, who
was also Secretary of the US Treasury. Morgenthau said it was
necessary to reduce the military -industrial strength of Germans
forever, so that never again could they threaten the peace. j_5 To
him and his friends, Poland and the security of Europe meant
little or nothing. In fact, their plan was a serious threat to the

safety of Europe because it distracted the Allies from the resis-
tance they might have made to the Soviets. It caused quarrels
among the Western Allies because they feared the communists
would 'exploit' the misery the Morgenthau Plan would create in
Germany. The reconstruction of Europe, which would avert
that threat, was seriously delayed by the destruction of the Ger-
man economy carried out under the Morgenthau Plan after May
1945. And the moral issues raised by the vengeance set people
against each other throughout the West.

Western planning for vengeance against Germans and for the
destruction of Germany began in England in August 1944, with
its chief architects Morgenthau and Dwight D. Eisenhower. 16
The birth of the plan was witnessed by one of Morgenthau's
aides, Fred Smith, who wrote:

On August 7, 1944 at approximately 12:35 P.M. in a
tent in southern England, the Morgenthau Plan was born.
Actually, it was General Dwight D. Eisenhower who
launched the project. . . . The subject first came up at lunch
in General Eisenhower's mess tent. Secretary Morgenthau,
Assistant to the Secretary Harry D. White and I were there.
White spoke of Germany, which was now certain to be
defeated . . . White said, 'What I think is that we should
give the entire German economy an opportunity to settle
down before we do anything about it.' Here Eisenhower
became grim and made the statement that actually sparked
the German hardship plan. [Smith notes here that 'This ma-
terial is taken from notes made directly after the meeting.']
He said: T am not interested in the German economy and
personally would not like to bolster it if that will make it
any easier for the Germans.' He said he thought the Germans
had punishment coming to them: The ringleaders and the SS
troops should be given the death penalty without question,
but punishment should not end there.'

He felt the people [emphasis in the original] were guilty of
supporting the regime and that made them a party to the entire
German project, and he personally would like to 'see things
made good and hard for them for a while'. He pointed out that
talk of letting Germany off easy after taking care of the top
people came from those who feared Russia and wanted to

strengthen Germany as a potential bulwark against any
desires Russia might someday have . . .

The General declared he saw no purpose in treating a
'paranoid' gently, and the 'whole German population is a
synthetic paranoid. All their life the people have been taught
to be paranoid in their actions and thoughts, and they have
to be snapped out of it. The only way to do that is to be good
and hard on them. I certainly see no point in bolstering their
economy or taking any other steps to help them.'

White remarked: 'We may want to quote you on the
problem of handling the German people.'

Eisenhower replied that he could be quoted. He said:
'I will tell the President myself, if necessary.' 17

Lord Keynes, the famous British economist, asked President
Roosevelt in late November if he was planning 'a complete
agrarian economy' for Germany. Although the American
people had been told that the Morgenthau Plan had been
abandoned, Roosevelt now told Keynes in secret that the plan
would be implemented. The German economy would be
reduced to a level 'not quite' completely agrarian, he said.
The plan went 'pretty far' in de-industrializing the Ruhr and
eliminating many of Germany's basic industries. j_8

The Morgenthau Plan has three remarkable aspects: that it
was devised, that it was implemented after it had been cancelled,
and that it has since been covered up so well. Now it has shrunk
from sight in the West. The basic idea of the plan was to wreck
or confiscate all important German industry, converting the
country into a huge farm, while at the same time destroying the
fertilizer plants on which German agriculture depended. It would
also cut Germany into pieces, and allot a huge piece of territory
to the Poles and Soviets. j_9 Anthony Eden, the British Foreign
Secretary, told Churchill at Quebec: 'You can't do this. After all,
you and I have publicly said quite the opposite.' Churchill
replied, 'Now I hope, Anthony, that you are not going to do
anything about this with the War Cabinet if you see a chance . . .'
Eden also said that he and Cordell Hull, the US Secretary of
State, were both 'horrified' at the plan. 20

Cordell Hull did not go with Roosevelt to Quebec, so it was
odd that Roosevelt allowed Morgenthau to present a plan for
the post-war treatment of Germany, a fantastically complicated
subject for which Morgenthau had no training at all. His venge-
ful views were the opposite of Hull's views on Germany. It was
a tragedy for the United States and all Europe that Hull had no
influence at Quebec, or at the major summit conference at Yalta
four months later.

Hull was never consulted about any of this vengeful business,
which he hated. He said after Quebec that, 'This whole deve-
lopment at Quebec I believe angered me as much as anything
that had happened during my career as Secretary of State.' 2J_
He knew and said, along with Secretary of War Henry L. Stim-
son, that the Morgenthau Plan would mean the deaths of some
twenty million Germans by starvation and exposure. If the plan
were leaked, it would give Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph
Goebbels, strong arguments for a bitter, futile resistance by the
Germans. The plan was leaked, Goebbels soon obliged, and the
Germans resisted to the bitter end. The Germans' fear of Allied
vengeance was so powerful that William Donovan, Director of
the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), wrote to the Joint Chiefs
of Staff on 27 November 1944 that, 'The horrible prospects of
exile to Siberia, eternal slavery, de-industrialization, break-up of
Germany and even sterilization, have been carefully portrayed to
the Germans by their Nazi leaders. It is considered that the Ger-
man spirit of resistance has been bolstered greatly by fear of
the consequence of unconditional surrender.' 22 The Germans
fought even when their country had been cut in half, but the
Japanese, who for years had defended their conquered pos-
sessions to the last man, gave up before they were invaded.

In shutting out Hull, who was supported by Secretary of War
Henry L. Stimson, Roosevelt and the Morgenthau planners were
also deliberately shutting out from government the opinions they
represented. In the nation these were clearly in the majority. The
majority of the press also opposed the Plan. 23 Hull was admired
and respected throughout the United States and the world because
he was free of the vengeful violence that infected the Morgenthau
supporters. In 1945, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Churchill told Stalin a few weeks after Quebec that the public
reaction to the Morgenthau Plan had displeased Roosevelt and
him. They were 'not very happy about its reception 1 . But he
added, 'Great Britain would not agree to mass execution of Ger-
mans, because one day British public opinion would cry out. 24
Yet development of the Morgenthau Plan went ahead in secret.

Eisenhower began to carry it out on his own initiative in 1944.
The first to suffer were the German prisoners. American prison
camps under Eisenhower's command in France were kept far
below the standards set by the Geneva Convention. 25 These
camps were described by Lt. Col. Henry W. Allard, who was in
charge of the US camps in France in 1945: 'The standards of PW
[prisoner of war] camps in the ComZ [the US Army's rear zone]
in Europe compare as only slightly better or even with the living
conditions of the Japanese PW camps our men tell us about, and
unfavourably with the Germans.' 26 To maintain such camps was
a war crime punishable by death, according to the Americans
after the war. They shot Japanese General Masaharu Homma in
1946 for maintaining camps in approximately the conditions
described by Allard. After the German surrender on 8 May 1945,
the American camps grew steadily worse.

The total occupation of Germany, and the destruction of Ger-
many' s armed forces, national government, political parties,
coupled with the trials of the war criminals, was the beginning
of the Allies' post-war policy. At the surrender in May 1945,
schools and universities were closed, as well as radio stations,
newspapers, the national Red Cross and mail service. Germany
was also stripped of much coal, her eastern territories, industrial
patents, lumber, gold reserves, and most of her labour force.
Allied teams also looted and destroyed Germany's factories,
offices, laboratories and workshops. So much food was confis-
cated that Max Huber of the International Red Cross complained
about it in August 1945 in a letter to the US State department. 27
Starting on May 8, the date of the surrender in the West, German
and Italian prisoners in Canada, Italy, the USA and the UK, who
had been fed according to the Geneva Convention, were sudden-
ly put on greatly reduced rations. In the US, some ex-prisoners
allege, starvation set in." 28

Gruesome expulsions of civilians from the eastern territories
now began. These were described by some writers in the West
as 'orderly and humane population transfers', while others
reported the lethal conditions as they were. German industrial
production in the winter of 1944-45, which even under the
Allied bombings was 105% of pre-war levels, was reduced
under the Morgenthau Plan to 25% of pre-war levels by
autumn 1945. 29

The public was fooled time and again into believing that the
Plan had been abandoned when it had not; that there was a fatal
world food shortage, when world food supplies were down by
only 2-10%; that there was a shipping shortage, when scores
of ships lay idle at wharves in North America and Europe. 30
Even so seasoned an observer as British historian Martin Gil-
bert has mistakenly written, after years of research on the war
and its aftermath, that: 'In the event, it was the State Depart-
ment which rejected it [the Morgenthau Plan].' 31 Morgenthau
himself wrote, in the New York Post on 24 November 1947,
after long study of Germany: 'Much has been said and written
about the so-called Morgenthau Plan for Germany from its first
beginnings until it ceased to be attributable to any one indivi-
dual. Then it became part of the Potsdam Agreement, a solemn
declaration of policy and undertaking for action ... for the three
greatest powers on earth.'

Morgenthau's friends were clearly more interested in vengeance
than in reparations. As Senator William Langer of North Dakota
stated in the United States Senate: 'History already records that
a savage minority of bloody bitter-enders within this government
forced the acceptance of the brutal Morgenthau Plan upon the
present administration. I ask, Mr President, why in God's name
did the administration accept it? . . . Recent developments have
merely confirmed scores of earlier charges that this addlepated
and vicious Morgenthau Plan had torn Europe in two and left
half of Germany incorporated in the ever-expanding sphere of
influence of an oriental totalitarian conspiracy. By continuing
a policy which keeps Germany divided against itself, we are
dividing the world against itself and turning loose across the
face of Europe a power and an enslaving and degrading cruelty
surpassing that of Hitler's.' 32

Senator Langer was not alone. His speech was warmly applau-
ded. The Senate voted in approval of a resolution that stated in
part, 'Whereas . . . reports reaching the United States indicate
that . . . the policies of the victor powers are subjecting mil-
lions to mass starvation, and whereas the United States has
been a party to the commitments and agreements reached
among the victor powers which have led to these conditions;
and whereas the Congress has been bypassed and the Ameri-
can people have been ignored in the formulation and imple-
mentation of these policies, and whereas it is essential that the
Congress of the United States should obtain the necessary
information to enact legislation and to request the President to
take executive action designed to eliminate the starvation con-
ditions resulting from the policies for which this Government
is directly responsible, Therefore, be it resolved . . .' And the
resolution went on to set up a group with a budget to study
conditions in Germany and to report in detail.

This resolution was proposed by the influential Senator Ken-
neth Wherry, together with several others, including Capehart,
Hawkes, La Follette, Hickenlooper, and Taft. In presenting the
motion, Wherry said, 'Much has been said and little done relative
to opening the mails to Germany and providing sufficient food
to prevent mass starvation in Germany, Austria, Italy and other
countries of Europe. Terrifying reports are filtering through the
British, French and American occupied zones, and even more
gruesome reports from the Russian occupied zone, revealing a
horrifying picture of deliberate and wholesale starvation.' He
criticized the Truman administration for doing nothing despite
the 'rising chorus of pleas for intercession' to prevent a 'major
tragedy' that was rapidly developing. He had questioned
Governor Lehman, in charge of the United Nations Relief and
Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), who admitted that the
UN aid was not feeding any of the starving Germans. Yet
President Truman had told Senator Wherry that UNRRA was
feeding Germans. This was not true. UNRRA never fed
Germans, who thus starved within reach of adequate food.

Time and again,' the Senator continued, 'the administration
has advanced the excuse that transportation facilities were
lacking, but for months scores of ships have been lying idle in
both eastern and European ports. So it is not a question of the
lack of ships. Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of GIs in
Europe are apparently sentenced to enforced idleness for want of
something to do. Millions of dollars' worth of surplus trucks and
jeeps are falling apart in their open-air garages in Europe.' Nor
was food scarce, for there was plenty in the civilian and the
military stores, Wherry said: 'The truth is that there are thou-
sands upon thousands of tons of military rations in our surplus
stock piles that have been spoiling right in the midst of starving
populations.' The government's defence of the Morgenthau Plan
was reduced to rubble by a couple of accurate criticisms, in
which Senator Wherry was joined by Senator Richard B. Rus-
sell, Jr. The government had said that the policy had been esta-
blished in agreement with the Allies not to feed ex-enemies, but
Russell said that the Allies were feeding Italians, who had also
been the enemy during the war, and he demanded to know why
they received food while the Germans starved." 33

What this actually meant to the mothers and children of Germany
was a repetition on a larger scale of the Nazi-induced famine in
the Netherlands during the winter of 1944-45. 34 Well over sixty
million people were deliberately pushed to the edge of death by
starvation. In Hamburg in 1946, in the British zone of occupation,
one touring British writer said that about 100,000 people were in
the last stages of starvation with hunger oedema. 35 In Diisseldorf
and many other cities, people lived like rats in a few square feet of
of wet basement under a heap of rubble. The English philanthropist
and publisher Victor Gollancz witnessed these conditions during
his visit to Germany in 1946. He wrote:

I made a more extensive tour of Diisseldorf dwelling-places
towards the end of the week. Down a long dark staircase and
then along a black tunnel was a man of 79, alone in a hole
which he had made habitable - according to the ruling stan-
dards - 'all by himself. His wife was out on the search for
bread. In another part of the same cellar was a mother with
three children - [aged] 6, 10 and 14. AH four of them slept in
the only bed, two side by side in the ordinary way and the

other two side by side at the foot of it. The mother came
back while we were there: it was 10:30 and she had been
queuing for bread since early morning and had returned
empty-handed - 'bread nowhere 1 . One of the children was
still in bed; none had yet had anything to eat, as the last
bread had gone yesterday. The father was a prisoner of
war in Russia. Two of the children had TB. There was a
tiny stove, but no coal or gas, only a little wood, which
they 'fetched 1 . For excretion they used a pail, which they
emptied every morning into a hole they had dug in the
courtyard above. They had twice been bombed out. On
one wall was a small faded photograph of the mother and
father at their wedding and on another some prince or king
with the legend 'Lerne leiden ohne zu klagen: learn to
suffer without complaining. 36

Gollancz went round the city with members of the local Red
Cross, who filled the starving Germans with 'gratitude and
happiness'. One dwelling place he visited with them was 'down
two long flights of stairs to an awful couple of rooms below'.
There were no windows, no fresh air entering at all except by
the door. This cellar had been flooded steadily for four weeks.
In it were living two women and five children, from two different
families. One of the women was pregnant; a child was covered
with sores. The smell was so bad that Gollancz had to cover his
nose and eat a lozenge on the way out. He visited cellar after
cellar like this. A few were decorated with crucifixes, photo-
graphs. In some he found people were who nevertheless cheer-
ful. 'All of them were grateful, terribly grateful, when they were
given something.' 37 The deaths of children with TB was already
nearly three times the pre-war rate in Dusseldorf; about one third
of the children in Iserlohn had TB; in Hamburg, diabetics in the
first stages of coma were trying to force their way into hospital
because there was no insulin. The latest news was that in the
British zone the starvation ration of a nominal 1,550 calories
per day (cpd) would now be reduced to l,000cpd for about six
months. At the top level of the US Army, reaction to all this was
expressed by General J. H. Hilldring, who said that the Germans
were being treated too lavishly. 38

These were some of the conditions that led Dr Amelunxen,
Minister-President of North Rhine -Westphalia in the British
zone, to predict that two to three million people in his province
of eleven million would die in the next few years. (Deaths in
two years at pre-war rates would be around 265,000.) The food
ration did not improve in the following eighteen months, but
grew slightly worse. 39

A member of the (Quaker) Society of Friends in Germany,
Hans Albrecht, also predicted a horrendous death rate. In
September 1945 he said, 'No child born in Germany this year
will survive the coming winter. Only half the children aged less
than three years will survive. 1 40 There was some evidence for
this fear already in Berlin, where the infant mortality rate for
several months had already been close to 100%. In the summer
of 1945 in Berlin, nearly every baby was born dead, or died
within a few days. Albrecht was also predicting that among
the estimated 2.5 to 2.7 million Germans aged three years and
under, half would die. Among the infants alone, the toll would
be well over one million, perhaps as high as a million and a half
dead. 4T

Most children under ten and people over sixty 42 could not
survive the coming winter, according to Probst Griiber, a man
experienced in such matters because he had just been saved from
one of Hitler's camps. Griiber wrote on 12 October 1945, 'In the
forest around Berlin, countless dead are hanging from the trees.
One becomes indifferent to death. Mothers see their children die
and bury them by the wayside, apparently with none of that pain
which usually tears a mother's heart apart ... If this misery cannot
be checked, it is no exaggeration to reckon on a figure of
20,000,000 dead this winter.' 43

'The infant mortality rate in Berlin is sixteen times as high as it
was in 1943,' reported the American journalist Edd Johnson.
Johnson knew horror, for he had witnessed it in Hitler's
concentration camps just weeks before. A German Red Cross
official had predicted to him an infant mortality rate of 80 - 90%
for winter 1945- 46, amid scenes of desolation hard to believe
in modern times. 'Germans are going to die like flies this winter,'
according to United States Public Health officers attached to the

army. 'There is going to be a definite age group elimination of
the German population.' 44

In the French zone, things were even worse, perhaps because
the French had suffered so much from German depredations
and atrocities in France. A huge number of soldiers, bureaucrats
and their families was imposed on the small zone. In 1946, the
French billetted 18 persons per 10,000 Germans, whereas the
British billetted ten and the Americans only three. The French
took all their housing and most of their food from the locals,
with the result that the local rations were always lower than the
meagre rations decreed in the other zones. But the French did
not feel that the enormous scale of their exactions and the
suffering of the Germans were justified, for they camouflaged
what they were doing, according to Price, Waterhouse and
Company. The big American accounting firm reported that
the 'defective nature of the accounts' kept by the French 'made
it impossible to produce an accountant's report on the foreign
trade of the zone'. 45 The Germans complained bitterly about
these false accounts. No German accounting of the foreign
exports was permitted by the French, who took the goods, at
prices they set themselves, and paid not in the precious dollars
received, but in marks, thus depriving the Germans of the one
way they had to buy foreign food. 46

For all these reasons, 'population losses were significant',
according to the American writer F. Roy Willis. The death rate
for the town of Landau in the Rheinland-Pfalz was 39.5%%
(where %% means per thousand) in 1946, which was more
than triple the pre-war rate. In 1947, it was 27%%, more than
double the pre-war rate. 47

In the British zone, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery feared
that the loss of life in the winter of 1945-46 was going to be
'very heavy'. 48 The daily ration for an average adult then was
1,042 calories, which he said meant that 'we are going to let
them starve: gradually'. 49 There were many voices at home and
abroad raised in protest against the treatment of Germany. The
Lord Bishop of Chichester, Lord Bertrand Russell and Victor
Gollancz protested vigorously in England, and many as well in
the US. The former Chief Rabbi of Berlin, Dr Baeck, was

reported in an influential US magazine to have 'horrified the hate
cult in this country by calling on his Jewish colleagues to join
with him in demanding relief feeding for Germany . . . ' 50

All this protest had no serious effect at first on the US Presi-
dent Harry S. Truman. Neglected, uninformed, like most of
the members of Roosevelt's Cabinet, Truman was ignorant of
many important matters when he arrived in office following
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's death in April 1945. The ailing
Hull, like his successor Edward Stettinius, was ignored, and
Henry Morgenthau, a great favourite of Roosevelt's, in effect
became Secretary of State for the most important decision of all
about Germany. Harry Hopkins, who had never been elected,
carried out the most important missions for the President. In the
spring of 1945, Truman was a minor figure whose great service
had been to run on the FDR ticket in 1944. He was not well
prepared to deal with the disasters now impending around the
world.

He had sufficient wit to call on Herbert Hoover in May 1945
for advice on the world food problem, but not enough to accept
the advice. Hoover warned Truman of the disasters that were
about to occur, but Truman ignored him, to his cost. As the sit-
uation grew worse, with rumours of French mistreatment of
prisoners emerging in the press and predictions of disaster
emerging from authoritative people in Germany, Truman was
cornered. He was caught between the consequences of the
Morgenthau Plan and the widespread opposition in the admin-
istration to revising any part of American policy in Germany.
Truman had never approved the Morgenthau Plan and only
discovered that it was being implemented when he had to deal
with its disastrous consequences.

Within a couple of months of taking office, Truman rid him-
self of Secretary Morgenthau. This was probably not because of
the plan, but because he had found Morgenthau over-reaching
himself in other ways. Soon after, Truman was sending missions
to Europe to look into conditions in refugee camps. And then in
the face of a famine that had already killed off hundreds of
thousands of Germans in later 1945, 51 he called on Herbert
Hoover for the second time.

The circumstances of that call are interesting. As the situation in
Germany had grown worse and worse, various senators visiting
the American zone discussed the situation with army officers.
They also received letters and reports from American civilians
and officers on the scene. Soon they were informed, and disgus-
ted. 52 Just after Christmas 1945, they met and discussed what
to do. It was decided to call on the President himself. This they
did on 8 January 1946. They made a personal appeal to him to
take immediate steps to permit the American people to relieve
the suffering directly. They particularly requested that the United
States raise the ration allowed to Germans and restore mail and
package services to the American zone. The sort of language
Truman heard was also audible in the Senate a few days later, in
the voice of Senator Wherry: 'The American people should know
once and for all that as a result of this government's official policy
they are being made the unwilling accomplices in the crime of
mass starvation . . . Germany is the only nation where UNRRA
is not permitted to feed its nationals. Germany is the only nation
subjected to a deliberate starvation policy of 1,500 calories per
day.' 53

This was fresh in Truman's mind when he finally wrote to
Hoover in January 1946 and asked him to do something about
food relief in Europe and round the world, except for Germany.
Once again, Hoover agreed.

While Hoover began to make his preparations for the 1946 world
tour which would eventually save hundreds of millions of lives,
the senators kept the pot boiling. Senator Wherry quoted at length
from an editorial in the Christian Century to help him express his
feelings. Calling it 'one of the most angry and inspired editorials
on this whole tragic subject', he read the whole last paragraph for
the Congressional Record of the Senate. 'There is not a day to be
lost . . . With every day the opportunity grows less to make real
to the people of Germany the Christian testimony to mercy and
brotherhood. With every day that Christian love is thwarted by
shortsighted and vengeful government policies, the prospect for
a future catastrophe grows. It is time that a united demand went
up from all American churches and church organizations for an
end to the armed barriers which now keep Christian charity from

our late enemies. It is time to let Washington know that American
Christians will no longer acquiesce in the Potsdam outrage. 1 54

A few weeks later, on 29 March 1946, Senator Langer had
received new information which caused him to rise again in the
Senate, to speak as follows:

[We] are caught in what has now unfolded as a savage
and fanatical plot to destroy the German people by visiting
on them a punishment in kind for the atrocities of their
leaders. Not only have the leaders of this plot permitted the
whole world situation to get. . . out of hand . . . but their
determination to destroy the German people and the German
Nation, no matter what the consequences to our own moral
principles, to our leadership in world affairs, to our Christian
faith, to our allies, or to the whole future peace of the world,
has become a world scandal. . . We have all seen the grim
pictures of the piled-up bodies uncovered by the American
and British armies, and our hearts have been wrung with pity
at the sight of such emaciation - reducing adults and even
little children to mere skeletons. Yet now, to our utter horror,
we discover that our own policies have merely spread those
same conditions even more widely . . . among our former
enemies. 55

The senators spoke with deep feeling, at great length. Side by
side with the hatred of evil so vigorously expressed was a
moving pity for the miserable victims. Clearly, without such
compassion there could hardly be the hatred of the evil-doing,
which brought hot shame to the cheeks of Langer, Gollancz and
all the others. In this pity, of course, there is nothing new: it is as
old as victims.

What seems to be new here is that it appeared at such a moment
among such victors. Neither the British nor the Americans were
known as gentle warriors. Nations and tribes all over the world,
from the Irish, French, Spanish and Scots to the Sioux, Seminole,
Filipinos, Zulus, Germans, Boers and Indians, had felt the furious
power of Anglo-Saxon militarism, and the vengeance that some-
times followed it. What is new here is that among these warlike
peoples, victorious once again in a world-wide war, compassion

for the enemy was expressed by senior figures as a matter of
duty, honour and pity, in deep opposition to the policy already
being carried out.

Mackenzie King expressed this plainly on 1 September 1945,
during the ceremonies in Ottawa at the end of the Japanese war:
All the United Nations were now committed to further the law
of peace, work and health, and to wishing success at the dawn of
the new era. I stressed particularly the colossal loss of life and
what we owe to the men who had given their lives. Blessed are
the peacemakers. 1 56 This speech got a terrific reception, perhaps
the warmest that this mild, cautious man had ever received.
These words were not only rhetoric: they expressed profound
feelings among hundreds of millions of English-speaking people
in the world. Mackenzie King was not only the Prime Minister
of a country which had made a major contribution to defeating
Hitler, he was also a friend and confidant of Roosevelt, John D.
Rockefeller, Winston Churchill and many other leaders. 'Peace,
work and health 1 expressed perfectly what 'common people' had
always wanted. This policy was chosen by the English-speaking
nations that could easily have continued a winning war. They
were implementing it in the face of a great danger from the
Soviets. And they were carrying it out massively, internationally,
with superb organization at high speed and terrific cost, to the
needy nations of earth save only one.

Nothing like this had ever happened before.

* * *

CHAPTER 3

From There No Prisoner Returned

Never had so many people been put in prison. The size of the
Allied captures was unprecedented in all history. The Soviets
took prisoner some 3.5 million Europeans, the Americans about
6.1 million, the British about 2.4 million, the Canadians about
300,000 and the French around 200,000. 1 Uncounted millions
of Japanese entered American captivity in 1945, plus about
640,000 entering Soviet captivity. 2

As soon as Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945, the American
Military Governor, General Eisenhower, sent out an 'urgent cou-
rier' throughout the huge area that he commanded, making it a
crime punishable by death for German civilians to feed prisoners .
It was even a death-penalty crime to gather food together in one
place to take it to prisoners. This astounding order contradicted
an earlier message from Eisenhower to the Joint Chiefs of Staff
on 10 March, saying that he would make the German civilians
feed the prisoners. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had approved this
in late April.

The order was sent in German to the provincial governments,
ordering them to distribute it immediately to local governments.
Copies of the orders were discovered recently in several villages
near the Rhine, among them Langenlonsheim.

The message, here reproduced, reads in part: '. . . under no cir-
cumstances may food supplies be assembled among the local
inhabitants in order to deliver them to the prisoners of war.
Those who violate this command and nevertheless try to
circumvent this blockade to allow something to come to the
prisoners place themselves in danger of being shot. . . .' 3

Eisenhower's order was also posted in English, German and
Polish on the bulletin board of Military Government Head-

quarters in Bavaria, signed by the Chief of Staff of the Military
Governor of Bavaria. Later it was posted in Polish in Straubing
and Regensburg, where there were a lot of Polish guard compa-
nies at nearby camps. One US Army officer who read the posted
order in May 1945 has written that it was 'the intention of Army
command regarding the German POW camps in the US Zone
from May 1945 through the end of 1947 to exterminate as
many POWs as the traffic would bear without international
scrutiny'. 4 Since this fatal order contravenes the order given by
the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Eisenhower, and since it entailed the
deaths of thousands of prisoners, it is important to German
civilians, to the prisoners, and to Army records in general. But in
the course of six months' research in the US archives, and also
in the Truman and Eisenhower libraries, the author has been
unable to locate the original of this order. Nor has he found any
trace of an order from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Eisenhower
ordering him to reverse the feeding policy agreed on just two
weeks before.

The army's policy was to starve prisoners, according to several
American soldiers who were there. Martin Brech, retired pro-
fessor of philosophy at Mercy College in New York, who was
a guard at Andernach in 1945, has said that he was told by an
officer that 'it is our policy that these men not be fed'. 5 The
50,000 to 60,000 men in Andernach were starving, living with
no shelter in holes in the ground, trying to nourish themselves
on grass. When Brech smuggled bread to them through the wire,
he was ordered to stop by an officer. Later, Brech sneaked more
food to them, was caught, and told by the same officer, 'If you
do that again, you'll be shot.' Brech saw bodies go out of the
camp 'by the truckload' but he was never told how many there
were, where they were buried, or how. 6

Former prisoners have led the way to putting names to prisoners
and one civilian who were shot for the 'crime' of passing food
through the barbed wire. Civilian women and teenage girls were
shot, shot at, and imprisoned for trying to take food to the camps,
although the Eisenhower order had purportedly given individual
camp commanders a chance to exempt family members trying to
feed relatives through the wire. 7 The prisoner Paul Schmitt was
shot in the American camp at Bretzenheim after coming close to

the wire to see his wife and young son who were bringing him a
basket of food. The French followed suit: Agnes Spira was shot
by French guards at Dietersheim in July 1945 for taking food to
prisoners. The memorial to her in nearby Budesheim, written by
one of her children, reads: 'On the 31st of July 1945, my mother
was suddenly and unexpectedly torn from me because of her
good deed toward the imprisoned soldiers. 1 The entry in the
Catholic church register says simply: A tragic demise, shot in
Dietersheim on 31.07.1945. Buried on 03.08.1945.' Martin Brech
watched in amazement as one officer at Andernach stood on a
hillside firing shots towards German women running away from
him in the valley below.

The most gruesome killing was witnessed by the prisoner
Hanns Scharf, formerly of California, who was watching as a
German woman with her two children came towards an
American guard in the camp at Bad Kreuznach, carrying a wine
bottle. She asked the guard to give the bottle to her husband,
who was just inside the wire. The guard upended the bottle into
his own mouth, and when it was empty, threw it on the ground
and killed the prisoner with five shots. The other prisoners
howled, which brought round US Army Lieutenant Holtsman of
Seattle, who said, 'This is awful. I'll make sure there is a stiff
court martial.' 8 In months of work in the Washington archives
of the army, no court martial of this or similar incidents has ever
turned up. Captain Lee Berwick, who was in command of the
guard towers at Bretzenheim nearby, has said that he was never
aware of any court martial for shootings at Bretzenheim or at
Bad Kreuznach. 9

The former prisoners leading the way in new research had been
officially ignored for forty-four years, but they are now actively
trying to uncover the truth behind the historical forgeries which
have been accepted as real up to now. At Lambach in Austria
early in 1996, during excavations for a new power plant, a mass
grave was opened on an 80m square site near the river Traun.
One theory is that these were the bodies of Jews who died
during transport, but the evidence suggests strongly that these
were German prisoners of the Americans. In 1945 there were
three American-run POW camps in the region, one at Hofau,
another at Grbberfeld a little farther to the east, and one for SS

men at Kuhweide to the west. Horst Littmann, an expert recom-
mended by the Austrian Ministry of the Interior, concluded that
the bodies were the dead prisoners from these American camps,
men between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two, judging from
the good condition of their teeth, the shape of their heads and
other evidence.

Such in-ground investigations could happen in Austria, and
people could dig up mass graves of prisoners at former Soviet
camps recently in eastern Germany, but west German farmer
Otto Tullius was prevented by the police from digging his own
land for evidence of prisoners on the site of a former American/
French camp. 10

The official US Army ration book, smuggled out by an ex-
prisoner, for the huge camp at Bretzenheim, shows that these
captives who nominally had prisoner-of-war status - supposedly
the best-treated of all - got only 600-850 calories per day. The
prisoners starved although 'food was piled up all round the camp
fence', according to Captain Lee Berwick of the 424th Infantry
Regiment, guardians of the camp. U_

Martin Brech has confirmed that Eisenhower's terror policy
was harshly enforced down to the lowest level of camp guard.
At the time that Brech was ordered to stop feeding prisoners on
pain of being shot himself, it scarcely seemed credible to him that
the army intended these prisoners to die. Now, seeing the new
evidence in 1995, Brech has said that, 'It is clear that in fact it
was the policy to shoot any civilians trying to feed the prisoners.'

Of course, individual French and American soldiers like Brech
were honorable exceptions to the orders from higher up. The
French Captain Julien of the Illeme Regiment de Tirailleurs
Algerien, who took over at Dietersheim from the Americans in
July 1945, forbade shooting at his camp. In fact, Julien was so
appalled at the condition of the prisoners that he immediately
organized food to come in from the village. But Julien got into
serious trouble with the French Army for quarrelling with a
fellow officer, Captain Rousseau, who shot at German women
in Juliens presence, at about the time and in the same place as a
French officer shot Frau Spira. Rousseau is remembered to this

day in the village as a bad man. At Bad Kreuznach, William
Sellner of Oakville, Ontario, one day saw civilians throw food
over the wire while guards watched indifferently. And yet, at
night, guards would shoot machine gun bullets at random into
the camps, apparently for sport. In Bad Kreuznach, Ernst
Richard Krische wrote in his diary on 4 May: 'Wild shooting in
the night, absolute fireworks. It must be the supposed peace.
Next morning forty dead as "victims of the fireworks", in our
cage alone, many wounded.' J_2

One American who tried to help the prisoners was Dr John
Allensworth, now of Mineral Wells, Texas, who was an officer in
the US Army Medical Corps. He was sent to Gummersbach, east
of Bonn, just after the Ruhr pocket collapsed in March 1945.
'There was a huge mass of humanity in a field standing shoulder
to shoulder in the mud, and I mean knee-deep. I would estimate
that 75% of them were wounded. The conditions were appalling.'
He immediately set up a 150-bed hospital in a tent for the priso-
ners. He said, 'My headquarters leaned over backwards to do
everything they could to help the prisoners,' so he was able to
get all the supplies he required immediately. 13

But the number of prisoners served by the tent hospitals was less
than 1% of the total on hand. And this was before the German
collapse, so that millions of Allied prisoners were still being held
hostage by the Germans. Thus the attitude of SHAEF (Supreme
Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) was probably more
conditioned by fear for the hostages than by the Geneva Con-
vention, which was in fact about to be abrogated by the US State
Department. 14

Conditions in the camps deteriorated further after the hostage
system collapsed. Despite the restrictions, other individual
American guards tried to help the German prisoners long after
the war ended, among them Captain Frederick Siegfriedt. He
was detailed as prison officer in an undermanned Prisoner of
War Overhead Detachment at a camp near Zimming in eastern
France in December 1945, where there were about 17,000
prioners, 'all presumably SS'. According to Siegfriedt, the pre-
vious prison officer had been relieved of his duties because of
psychiatric problems. A lifelong friend of Siegfriedt was the

medical officer for the detachment. 'Captain L. had been an
extremely hardworking and conscientious person all his life. It
was evident that he was under extreme stress, trying to cope
with the conditions at CCE 27 and receiving no co-operation,
no help, no understanding, without even someone to talk to. I
was able to serve to fill the latter need. He explained to me that
most of the men had dysentery and were suffering from mal-
nutrition. Some men in the cages had as many as seventeen
bloody stools per day, he said. He took me to one of the former
French barracks that served as the hospital. It had eight hundred
men lying all over, on the cold concrete floors as well as on
beds . . . almost without exception the other [US] officers were
alcoholics or had psychiatric problems . . .'

The rest of the men were kept in Nissen huts, made of chicken
wire covered with tar paper. Water was supplied by a single tap
inside the hut, which was usually frozen that winter. The priso-
ners slept on the muddy ground, about 180 to a hut. So crowded
were they that it was impossible for them all to lie on their back
at once. Sometimes at the roll calls in the morning, men fell over
dead.

The operation of CCE 27 seemed typical of the entire system,'
Siegfriedt has said. 'When an enclosure got a bunch of priso-
ners they didn't know what to do with, or could not otherwise
handle, they were shipped unannounced to another enclosure
... I have no idea how many died nor where they were buried.
I am sure the Americans did not bury them and we had no such
thing as a bulldozer. I can only assume that a detail of German
PWs would bury them. I could look out the window of my
office and tell if the body being carried by was alive or dead
by whether or not there was a fifth man following with the man's
personal possessions. The number could have been from five to
twenty per day.

'The officers' mess was in a French two-storey house. It had a
staff of forty -two [prisoners] with the maitre d'hotel of the Ger-
man luxury liner Europa in charge. Although there were usually
no more than six or eight officers dining at one time, there were
always at least that many uniformed waiters. One could not get a
cigarette from pocket to lips without a light waiting. The facility

was completely redecorated, that is repainted with murals for
each special occasion, i.e. Christmas, New Year's, Valentine's
Day, St Patrick's Day, etc. For lunch there was chamber music
with four to six musicians and for dinner a choir of fifteen to
twenty made up of the stars of the Munich and Berlin operas.
In short, the staff was much more concerned with living the
luxurious life than it was about the operation of the prison
camps.'

Siegfriedt attempted to alleviate the conditions by bribing
guards at excess vehicle camps with cigarettes so he could take
their trucks to scrounge some hay in the neighbourhood 'to get
the PWs off the ground. When the weather warmed up, the
cages became ankle-deep in mud. I located a pierced-plank air-
field (one composed of sectional wooden parts pierced to grip
the earth and allow drainage) and, with a convoy of trucks,
brought it back to get the men out of the mud. These, however,
were band-aid measures for major problems that no one seemed
to be in a position to deal with, nor did anyone seem to care.'

Captain Siegfriedt concluded: 'Obviously we, the US Army,
were not prepared to deal with so many prisoners even when I
arrived on the scene in December 1945.' This was close to the
Vosges area of France that US Army Colonel Philip Lauben
described as one big death camp'.

Prisoners who survived the camp at Bretzenheim have descri-
bed arriving there on 9 May 1945. They saw three rows of
corpses along the road in front of the camp. Seventy- five dead
from Bretzenheim were acknowledged by the Americans to
have been buried in Stromberg on 9 May and another sixty on
10 May. 15 Not all were killed by the usual disease, starvation
and exposure.

The village of Bretzenheim has also been the locale of much
new research into the fate of prisoners. Herr and Frau Wolf-
gang Spietz of Bretzenheim took up a challenge from the local
Protestant pastor in 1985 to prepare a display about the local
camp which had been under American and later French control.
With the official support of Burgermeister Griinwald, this grew
into the present documentation centre. A sensational find came

in 1990 with the visit of Rudi Buchal of Grossenhain, in the
east of Germany, who had been a prisoner in the American
time. Buchal had served as a medical orderly-clerk in the so-
called POW 'hospital' for prisoners, a tent with an earth floor
inside the camp. It had no beds, no medical supplies, no blan-
kets and starvation rations for the first month or more. Later,
a few supplies were scrounged at random by American teams
'ferreting' the German towns nearby.

Another of the prisoners who have come forward recently to
the Spietzes is Jakob M. Zacher, a former teacher and school
principal of Bretzenheim. He was especially interested in the
fate of the prisoners because he had been held in several camps,
including Bretzenheim itself. In the 1980s, he decided to look in
the archives for 1945 of the village at Langenlonsheim, which
was so close to the Bretzenheim camp that prisoners could see
the spires of its churches above the trees to the north. In the
town hall under the spires, he found the document showing that
the Americans had threatened to shoot anyone who tried to take
food to the camps. Other copies of the order have been found
since in other villages. j_6

Also in Bretzenheim in the Spietzes's house, four ex-prisoners
met in 1991 to discuss their experiences. Max Moller of Bad
Kreuznach laid on the Spietzes' dining-room table the water-
stained original US Army ration book for Bretzenheim, a hard-
cover German ledger book with the name of a clerk who had
kept it still legible in pencil on the cover. This was Robert Hugh-
son, of the 424th Regiment, 106th Infantry Division. Later in the
USA, the Supply Officer of the 106th told this writer, 'Yes, I
remember Hughson.' And Captain Lee Berwick said, 'We had
supplies stacked all round the camp.' He could not explain why
the prisoners got only about 600-850 calories per day, which
was the ration according to Hughson's records. 17 And these
prisoners nominally had Prisoner of War status.

Berwick's statement about food supplies is at odds not only
with the official army ration book, but with the reports of ten is
prisoners and several civilians received by the author. Without
exception, they describe starvation conditions prevailing
through the seventy-odd days when the camp was under US

control. 18 The prisoner Herbert Peters has reported similar
conditions at the huge US camp at Rheinberg: 'Even when there
was little for us to eat, the provisions enclosure was enormous.
Piles of cartons like bungalows with intersecting streets through-
out.' 19

As the Americans prepared to leave Bretzenheim in July, Buchal
was told by drivers of the 560th Ambulance Company, who had
carried bodies and sick prisoner 'evacuees' away, that 18,100
persons had died in the six camps round Bretzenheim in the ten
weeks of American control. The destination of the corpses was
not revealed to Buchal. He also heard the figure of 18,100 dead
from the Germans who were in charge of the hospital statistics,
and from other American hospital personnel.

The six camps were Bretzenheim, Biebelsheim, Bad Kreuznach,
Dietersheim, Hechtsheim and Heidesheim. The reliability of
Buchal has been attested by the US Army itself. When he was
finally discharged, Buchal received a paper stating that in the
opinion of the US Army officers who commanded him, 'During
the above mentioned period [April- July 1945] he proved himself
to be co-operative, capable, industrious and reliable.' 20

Captain Berwick said on reading Buchal's report of 18,100 corp-
ses in a draft of this chapter, 'That might be true.' The 18,100
figure is in general confirmed by reports from five prisoners who
survived Bretzenheim. Several report deaths of over fifty per day
for a long period in the camp alone, apart from the hospital. 21
One reported 120 to 180 bodies per day coming out of the camp,
apart from the hospital. 22

The death total of 18,100, taken with the known period often
weeks and the known average population of the six camps,
217,000, means that the death rate was 43% per year. This is
much higher than the figure 35.6% apparent from Table X in
the Medical History of the ETO (European Theater of Operati-
ons), which was used to help determine the overall death rates
in Other Losses in 1989. A high number of corpses on many
days was also observed by several American guards at the
camp. 23

Captain Berwick was in charge of the German Lager captains
who had to carry out the dead bodies every day. Berwick esti-
mates that three to five bodies per day were taken from each
of twenty cages within the larger enclosure, during the worst
time, which lasted some sixteen days. This means that from the
camp proper, excluding the hospital, some 960 to 1,600 bodies
were taken away in only sixteen days from Bretzenheim alone.
Berwick does not know where they were taken. Adding the
probable hospital deaths computed from statistics for the hospi-
tals at both Bretzenheim and Bad Kreuznach nearby, and from
the overall medical records of the 106th Division, which guar-
ded Bretzenheim and Bad Kreuznach, the overall death rate
at Bretzenheim - in the open camp, in the hospital inside the
camp, and among those evacuated to outside 'evacuation hos-
pitals' - was above 40% per year during those ten weeks. Ber-
wick has also said that, because the guards made efforts to im-
prove the camp, the death rate there dropped very significantly
after the disasters of the early weeks. 'By July, the deaths were
negligible,' he said.

My book Other Losses was criticized for making estimates of
the deaths of prisoners far higher than the critics felt were jus-
tified by the evidence offered. Now, however, detailed evidence
from the US Army 106th Division medical records and from the
records of the 50th Field Hospital adds depth to the picture.

Assessing the deaths, the first thing to notice is that there were
three areas where corpses accumulated. First was in the open air
inside the camps themselves, where the living might die of mal-
nutrition, disease, exposure, be buried alive when their earth-
holes collapsed on them, or drown in the latrine ditches. Many
of the bodies of those who died from starvation and disease
were pulled out to the camp gate and driven away by truck.

The second death area was in the camp hospitals themselves,
usually located inside the camp in a tent. The third area was
during the transportation to, or in the 'evacuation hospitals'.
For several of the camp hospitals, we have detailed records. 24
These hospitals were part of a system of sixteen field 'hospital
units', 25 each one set up usually in tents inside or very near to
the camps. Their capacity was some 14,000 patients at peak.

On average, in May, their capacity was around 9,500. Occu-
pancy for two observed camp hospitals was around 90%. 26
About half the patients admitted to these hospital units in May-
July 1945 were reported to have been evacuated further on,
to 'evacuation hospitals' in Europe but far from the camp. Some
of these 'evacuation hospitals' were purported to be located in
former German civilian hospitals, which were supposed to be
administered by a few Germans under American supervision.
Others were staffed by Americans.

The records show that thousands of sick prisoners were taken
from the camps and sent to these hospitals, and while there dis-
appeared from the records. For instance, from 1 May to 10 July
1945, 44,646 prisoners were taken from the camps to hospital,
including both camp hospitals and evacuation hospitals, but only
12,786 returned to the camps after treatment. The deaths recor-
ded were 1,392. There is no record of the fate of the remaining
30,468. There is a strong clue however in the ambulance records
of the medical department of the 106th Division. From 1 May to
10 July, the 106th Division ambulances carried 21,551 sick pri-
prisoners away from the camp hospitals to the evacuation hospi-
tals. The page showing arrivals in the evacuation hospitals has a
series of zeroes under enemy. 27

This cannot be a statistical blip. First, the same pages of forms
record with apparent coherence what happened to American
personnel. And for them, there are regular arrivals at the evacu-
ation hospitals, and departures from the same hospitals. Also,
the 106th report is set up with columns and headings defining
various categories of patients including Casuals and Enemy
(Allied, Civilian), as well as US troops. All these categories are
recorded on the same sheets of paper. Only the enemy prisoners
depart for these places and fail to arrive. Only enemy prisoners
do not turn up as returning 'to duty' - i.e., to the original prison
camp. Nor does the report give breakdowns of enemy prisoners
by communicable disease, for number of deaths, or for surgical
cases, though these breakdowns are given in every case for sick
Americans in their evacuation hospitals. The Germans become
a series of zeroes.

At least one German doctor, Siegfried Enke of Wuppertal, who
worked in American camp hospital units, has said that mortally
ill patients were moved away to another building (probably
called an evacuation hospital) and he never saw them again. 28
This was also the experience of Rudi Bwchai at Bretzenheim.
Many of the mortally sick evacuees were taken to Idstein, north
of Wiesbaden. Buchal has recently stated: And I can remember
that from there no prisoners returned. 1

A vivid description of one such evacuation 'hospital' is given
from the inside by a French doctor from Lorraine who volun-
teered to help the French and Americans to care for German
prisoners in May 1945. Dr Joseph Kirsch writes: 'I volunteered
to the Military Government of the 2 1 st [French] Military region
[near Metz] ... I was assigned to the "French" Military hospital at
the little seminary of Montigny ... In May 1945, the Americans
who occupied the hospital at Legouest brought us every night by
ambulance, stretchers loaded with moribund prisoners in German
uniforms . . . these ambulances arrived by the back door ... we
lined up the stretchers in the central hall. For treatment, we had
nothing at our disposal. We could only perform elementary
superficial examinations (auscultation). Only to find out the
anticipated cause of death in the night. . . for in the morning,
more ambulances arrived with coffins and quicklime . . . These
prisoners were in such extremely bad condition that my role was
reduced to comforting the dying. This drama has obsessed me
since the war; I consider it as a horror.' 29 The reader may judge
what opinion the Americans had of these 'hospitals' by the fact
that beside the patients they loaded quicklime and coffins. 30

The notion of hospitalizing sick Germans got a bizarre twist as
the Americans advanced into Germany. The army actually
removed sick Germans when they were captured lying in their
hospital beds. These patients were forced, regardless of their
condition, into the open-air camps. 31 Thus in the spring of
1945, the army reversed the meaning of the term 'hospital'. Sick
prisoners were not sent there. The sick were evacuated from the
hospitals, which then stood silent. 32

The evidence that evacuations were nearly all hidden deaths
grows even stronger with the arrival of the French in July. The

French, who took over the whole Rhine area - including camps
and hospitals - from the Americans in July, complained that the
Americans had said that there were 192,000 men in the camps
and hospitals, but the French actually found only 166,000. 33
US Army Colonel Philip S. Lauben admitted in a memorandum
to General Paul of the US Army on 7 July that the prisoner total
to be turned over was 'only in the neighborhood of 170,000'. 34
Since this was the area controlled by the 106th, Lauben's mis-
sing 22,000 prisoners are probably accounted for a second time,
in this book. Not only could the French not find them, the US
Army couldn't find them either.

Lauben had a broad view of the whole prisoner situation. As a
member of the SHAEF HQ staff, he was in charge of returning
prisoners from Norway, of the hand over to the French, and of
other special missions, with overall responsibility for prisoners
through the German Affairs Branch. Since both Lauben and the
106th Division surgeon admitted they were not there, and the
French did not find them, is any other fate but death imaginable
for these people?

The most impressive of the detailed evidence of deaths recorded
by hospital units comes from the 106th Division. In the hospital
units of the 106th, not including 'evacuation hospitals', 1,392
people died in seventy days among a patient load of 23,095.
This means that for more than two months, by US Army medi-
cal records, the prisoner-of-war death rate in hospital was 2.6%
per month, or 3 1.2% per annum. 35 This is exactly the same as
the 0.6%) rate per week used in Other Losses to compute deaths
for prisoners of war in the same camps in the same period.

A subsidiary report from the 50th Field Hospital Detachment A
at Bad Kreuznach confirms the overall picture. At Bad Kreuz-
nach, a camp of some 56,000 in the 106th command, the deaths
in hospital recorded by Major Jennings B. Marshall, commander,
numbered 174 among 1,825 patients in twenty-four days, or
9.5%. 36

At Bretzenheim, just three miles away, Max Dellmann, the
camp's Protestant pastor in 1946, was told by the German
doctors of the 50th Field Hospital HQ Detachment in the camp,

that between 3,000 and 4,000 men had died there while the
Americans were in command. 37 The German doctors knew
only of the deaths in the camp itself, which did not include the
deaths in the 'evacuation hospitals'. 38 So to find the complete
total for Bretzenheim, the Dellmann total must be added to the
Bretzenheim share of the death totals in the hospital units
reported by the 106th medical section (above). 39 On this basis,
the overall death rate for Bretzenheim in April- July 1945 works
out to between 45 and 57.5% per year. It is important to
remember that the total 'death production' for the camp during
the period has three components: the dead in the camp itself,
who were either buried there or trucked away; the dead in the
camp hospital; and those who died in or en route to 'evacuation
hospital' and euphemized as 'evacuated'. The totals are:

Camp, including the camp hospital: 3,000 to 6,240 40
'Evacuated': 3,380 to 4,142 41

The overall total for Bretzenheim is between 6,380 and 10,382.
This works out to an annual death rate somewhere between 44.9
and 73%.

The conclusion is simply inescapable that nearly all the men
missing on handover to the French were actually dead. 42 When
these missing are added to the known dead actually recorded in
army figures for May 1 to July 10, the toll rises to between
26,000 and 33,557. 43 This means the overall death rate in the
Adsec (Advance Section, US Army) camps during the ten weeks
starting May 1 was between 27.6% per year and 35.6% per year.
44 The latter figure is exactly the same as the figure based on
Tables IX and X in the Medical History of the ETO 45 And it is
close to the rate at which prisoners were dying according to the
'Other Losses' category reported in the weekly PW and DEF
reports (reports of prisoners of war and disarmed enemy force)
of the Army in 1945 and confirmed by Colonel Lauben himself,
before he was re-educated by a US Army official in 1990. 46

It is clear from a scrutiny of the records that the army in 1945
was disposing of the news of their dead by falsifying statistics.
This extended to the highest levels. For instance, on 4 August
1945, 132,262 DEF prisoners were reported by the prisoner of

war section of Eisenhower's command (hitherto SHAEF) to have
been 'transferred' to Austria, where General Mark Clark was the
political commissioner. Clark as political commissioner was
responsible for immigrants and emigrants, including DEF
prisoners arriving in Austria, so he reported that in the month
of August a total of 17,953 DEF prisoners arrived in Austria.
Clearly, no transfer of 132,262 ever took place. If the 1 14,309
missing prisoners were transferred away as 'Other Losses', but
never arrived in Austria, what happened to them? There is only
one way to leave a place and not to arrive anywhere else, and
that is to die.

The prisoner-of-war death figures reluctantly given out by the
Americans and French from the 1950s to the 1990s to cautiously
inquiring Germans were so ridiculously low that they were under
the civilian death rates for the time. This extraordinary news -
that starved people ridden with lice, pneumonia, TB and typhoid
fever, sleeping in mud, have a lower mortality than civilians
eating every day in houses - did not strike the German observers
as odd. They blithely ignored evidence that was howling at
them. 47 For instance, the authority on whom the German writer
Kurt W. Boehme depends for prisoner facts for France, General
Louis Buisson, was not only the head of the Prisoner of War
Service of the French Army and the author of the ridiculously
low French death figures, he also did not include in his prisoner-
of-war totals 166,000 men the French received in camps in
Germany from the Americans. Yet a few pages further on in his
manuscript, Buisson asserts that a number of these same POWs
were 'reldche sur place', or released on the spot, in Germany.
So 166,000 men disappear from view in Buisson's manuscript,
those who were released are used to reduce the total of the
remainder in French camps, and for forty-seven years no one
notices this double-dealing.

These prisoners were supposedly being held in order to provide
labour to help rebuild the damage caused in the war. The French
had a strong claim to the labour of Germans, because Hitler had
broken the truce agreement of June 1940 to return French priso-
ners to their homes. He kept one and a half million French sol-
diers and civilians slaving in Germany for years during the war.
The French also wanted German labour to repair some of the

damage done to their country during the campaigns. Having
captured very few prisoners themselves, they asked the British
and Americans for part of their bag. The Americans granted
them around 800,000, the British some 55,000. 48

Vengeance predominated in the French camps. As the months
passed, so did the lives of hundreds of thousands of their Ger-
mans. After the French press began reporting mass deaths in
the French camps in September-October 1945, senators in the
United States began a vigorous protest against this aspect of US
Army policy. In March 1946, when deaths in one part of the
Buglose-Labouheyre camp system had peaked at 25% for one
month, 49 Senator Langer said in the Senate: 'On 12 Oct. 1945,
the United States Army officials stopped turning over German
prisoners to the French after the International Red Cross
charged the French with failing to provide sufficient food for
German prisoners in French camps . . . General Louis Buisson,
Director of the War Prisons, said that food rations were "just
enough to allow a man to lie down, not move, and not die too
quickly". 50 The Senator went on: 'In spite of the certain fate
awaiting German prisoners of war in French hands, this govern-
ment continues to be a party to sentencing German prisoners of
war to starvation in continued violation of the articles of war of
the Geneva Convention.' 5J_

He was right about the conditions the French camps, but he
had been deceived about the US Army's transfer policy. The
army had pretended to stop delivering German slaves to the
French, but in fact they continued. More than a hundred
thousand were delivered after the ban was announced. Some
Germans who had already been discharged by General Mark
Clark in Austria were seized again and sent to France. 52

The British also were using some 400,000 German prisoners is
low-paid forced labour in the United Kingdom, and the Ameri-
cans had some 600,000 Germans at work in the fields of the
United States or in labour camps in Europe. 53 The prisoners
in the US, having been well treated until May 1945, were then
put on rations so low that some were in danger of death, though
the records are not clear as to how many actually died. How-
ever, the death rate was probably quite low. 54

President Truman decided in the spring of 1946 to keep at least
50,000 Germans imprisoned and working in the USA, while
their families were starving, partly for lack of labour in Germany.
During the discussion of what to do about the Germans in the
US, Secretary of War Robert Patterson said that he wanted to
return 'all prisoners of war as soon as possible'. He pointed out
that the programme of return had been announced four months
previously, and he added, 'It would not do to depend indefinitely
on what amounted to slave labour while millions of our own
people were unemployed . . . The Secretary of State supported
me in this view.' Truman ordered as 'an emergency measure'
that 50,000 prisoners be kept for at least three more months,
while disclaiming any intention of keeping them longer. The
last non-criminal Germans were not released from US captivity
until 1947, still during Truman's presidency. It is hard to see
what emergency the prisoners could have helped solve in the
US, for there was unemployment in the US at the time, and the
labour force was already over sixty-four million. The 50,000
slaves thus constituted 0.08% of the labour force. 55

In the many angry speeches made by US senators in 1946, not
a word was uttered on the subject of the American prison camps
in Europe, where more than 500,000 people died in 1945-46. 56
At first it seems very strange that not a word appears about these
American camps. At that very time, General Mark Clark in
Austria wrote a memo saying that he had ordered his men to
clean up the 'deplorable' camp at Ebensee, even though he
doubted he had the authority, which rested with Eisenhower. 57
Colonel Lauben was thinking that 'the Vosges was just one big
death camp' 58 and General Allard was describing Eisenhower's
camps as hardly better than the Japanese camps. 59 But the
senators, for all their righteous wrath, said nothing. Why?

The senators were kept in ignorance. All these American army
officers kept these secrets for forty years or more. Clark wrote
his memo 'for files', where it stayed until disinterred in 1990 by
the archivist Jane Yates in Charleston. General Allard made his
criticism in secret in 1946, in a training manual that stayed in the
archives at Fort Leavenworth until it was dug out by the resear-
cher E. B. Walker of Alabama in 1991. The statement by Colo-

nel Philip Lauben was not recorded until 1988, forty-three
years after the event. And all the hundreds of English-speaking
reporters who were in Europe at the time either failed to get the
story, or knowingly suppressed it.

The secret of the camps was kept so well that not even the
Chief Delegate in France of the International Committee of the
Red Cross (ICRC) knew about them, though he was responsible
for inspecting them under the Geneva Convention. Jean Pierre
Pradervand, head of the French delegation of the ICRC, did not
discover until he was told by the present writer in 1986 that the
American army had prison camps in France in 1945. 60 The
ICRC refused this writer permission to use its archive on priso-
ners of war. They told me this was because they never allow
anyone to use their archives. However, at the same time, they
permitted three other writers, one American, one Swiss and one
Israeli, to investigate their archives for books on the German
expellees, or for reports of ICRC actions in Hitler's concen-
tration camps in the same period.

Much concerning these atrocities has been deliberately
suppressed, some has been forgotten, some falsified, but per-
haps the most poignant anecdote was given by an ex-prisoner,
Johannes Heising, who in the 1990s published a book about
his experiences in the US camp at Remagen. 61 After the book
was published, Heising was talking in 1991 with another former
Remagen prisoner, Franz- Josef Plemper, who reminded him of
something Heising had not described in the book: one night,
the Americans had bulldozed living men under the earth in their
foxholes. Plemper described the scene to him: 'One night in
April 1945, 1 was startled out of my stupor in the rain and the
mud by piercing screams and loud groans. I jumped up and saw
in the distance (about 30-50 meters) the searchlight of a bull-
dozer. Then I saw this bulldozer moving forwards through the
crowd of prisoners who lay there. In the front it had a blade
making a pathway. How many of the prisoners were buried
alive in their earthholes I do not know. It was no longer pos-
sible to ascertain. I heard clearly cries of "you murderer".'

And then Heising remembered.

CHAPTER 4

A Holiday in Hell

East of the American and French camps, in a different world,
similar atrocities were happening. One was described by a sur-
vivor: 'The old women are bolder than the rest. You couldn't turn
them bad. They believe in God. And they would break off a piece
of bread from their meagre loaf and throw it to us. And old camp
hands - non-political offenders of course - weren't afraid either.
All camp veterans knew the saying, "Whoever hasn't been here
yet will get here, and whoever was here won't forget it." And
look, they'd toss over a pack of cigarettes, hoping that someone
might do the same for them during their next term. And the old
woman's bread wouldn't carry quite far enough, what with her
weak arm, and it would fall short, whereas the pack of cigarettes
would arc through the air right into our midst, and the convoy
guards would immediately work the bolts of their rifles, pointing
them at the old woman, at kindness, at the bread: "Come on old
woman, run along." This description, mirrored to the gesture in
the US camps, was actually written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
writing about Stalin's Gulag. 1

The Gulag (Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerei) was terrifying in
part because it was so hidden. Like Soviet Russia itself, the
prison system run by the MVD/NKVD/KGB was virtually
unknown, while at the same time being universally feared. It
was the same with the parallel Gulag for the prisoners of war,
also run by the MVD/NKVD/KGB .

This was a vast system of 6,000 camps spread across the USSR
from Minsk in the west to Karaganda in the south-centre,
Vorkuta in the north and Magadan in the north-east. 2 Magadan
was especially horrible. Solzhenitsyn visited the remains of the
camp on his way home to Moscow in 1994, to pay homage to the
dead slaves who had lived and died alongside him. Vorkuta, a
dismal collection of huts thousands of kilometres north-east of
Moscow, was reached after a terrifying voyage in an open barge

or scow, when the prisoners were in danger of freezing to
death as they were sprayed with icy water.

In these camps they mined for coal, iron, copper or gold; they
cut timber; they were sent out on work details to build roads,
bridges and railway embankments. Some of them were detailed
to build houses in Moscow, which stand to this day and are
proudly displayed to tourists as 'the German houses'. Others
were co-opted into re-education camps such as Krasnogorsk,
west of Moscow, where they were indoctrinated in communism.
A few with technical skills worked on high-technology instal-
lations such as the new telephone exchange north of Moscow.

The first European prisoners, Poles and Finns, were taken in
1939. To them were added Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians
in 1940, Germans, Italians, Romanians and so on after June
1941. The surviving Poles were released in the autumn of 1941
at Churchill's suggestion, to form battalions of freedom-fighters
who would try to liberate Poland from the Nazis with the help of
the USSR.

The camps for Germans and other Europeans were at their
worst at the beginning of the war. 3 After the initial disorgani-
zation following the German defeat at Stalingrad in February
1943, the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs)
worked very close to the front, taking over and recording pris-
oners. The death rate was very high at first among the Germans
and Italians captured at Stalingrad, caused in part by the fact that
the Axis soldiers were already dying when captured. Before
surrender, the Germans were losing between 400 and 500 per
day because of frostbite and disease. 4

Between 10 January and 22 February 1943, the Red Army took
prisoner 91,545 men. Conditions even after capture were appal-
ling. Former POW G. Kurtz said later: 'I survived Stalingrad, the
exhausting marches, I even survived the death camp of Beke-
tovka, where in a couple of weeks, of my 55,000 comrades,
42,000 died from hunger and disease.' 5 Beketovka was so bad
in comparison with other camps that an investigation was con-
ducted between 22-25 March. The doctors reported that 29% of
the prisoners were well, but that 71% were sick, infested with

lice, and exhausted. Most had inadequate clothing; some
were dressed in civilian clothes. Better accommodation and
more food were supplied. The rations ordered for the prisoners
were 600 grams of bread per day, plus 120 grams offish, 600
grams of potatoes or vegetables, 20 grams of sugar, with
matches, soap and other supplies. By the end of the war, the
camp had its own vegetable gardens. By 1949 these were so
productive they were selling 1,819,000 roubles' worth of
produce per year. 6

Among the one million German prisoners on hand in summer
1945, until the last prisoner went home in 1955, about 94,000
died (9.4%). 7 Once the Soviets were organized, only a day or
two elapsed usually between a soldier's capture and his entry into
the NKVD camps and into the record books of the NKVD, where
his fate was accurately recorded. These books were kept by
NKVD officers, each of whom signed his name to the statistics it
contained. He was responsible not only for the prisoners, but for
their production and consumption. Junior officers were ordered
to feed the prisoners a plentiful ration in October 1944. 8 The
ration included 600 grams of black bread every day, spaghetti,
meat, sugar, vegetables, rice, amounting in all to more than
1,400 grams or more than three pounds of food per person per
day. The weak, the sick and the officers got more, the war
criminals less.

Dozens of reports from returned prisoners show that this ration
was not always given, because the officers and guards stole the
prisoners' food for themselves. Several Germans have reported
that once they began to receive food parcels from home, they
shared the food with their guards. 9 In contrast with the Ameri-
can policy threatening death to civilians for feeding prisoners,
the Soviet policy was to feed the prisoners adequately. And this
policy emanated from the highest, most frightening authority in
the Soviet Union, Stalin himself. 10

The death rate was sharply reduced by 1945, mainly because
the Soviets wanted to get useful work out of the prisoners. As
Stalin told Harry Hopkins, an emissary of Presidents Roosevelt
and Truman, in May 1945, he liked the German prisoners best
because they worked the hardest. However, the actual produc-

tion was by Soviet measure, slightly less than the cost to the
state of keeping and guarding them. This is not surprising since
the whole country has been grossly inefficient.

Russian work camps have always been like this. The fate of
Tsarist prisoners was much studied in the nineteenth century
by prison officials and by one famous writer, Anton Chekhov.
When he was rich and famous, he risked his life and reputation
to inquire into the fate of the lowly prisoners on Sakhalin Island.
While serving their terms, Chekhov wrote, the convicts in the
Due mine in 1889-90 produced coal at the rate of about 10.8
poods per day, which was 4.2 poods below the norm set by the
camp administration. When freed, some of them stayed on the
island and worked for wages in the mine. Now that they were
paid by the pood (approximately 36 pounds, or 16 kilos), their
output immediately rose by between 70 and 100%. 11

The sources of wealth and poverty are plain to see in Sakhalin.
So long as totalitarian power was applied, it hurt society twice,
by impoverishment and by the spread of human misery, in the
prisoners themselves, and in the guards, because of their soul-
destroying work. With the end of state power over the prisoners,
everything got better. Wealth was born of freedom. This was the
judgement of one of the world's great writers, in a book that
resulted in considerable reforms to the legal and political system
in Tsarist Russia.

The MVD/NKVD/KGB reproduced Sakhalin on a vast scale
with their camps for prisoners of war. The worth of the output of
the prisoner-slaves was measured by the MVD in 1946-49. 12
The slaves' output was never enough to pay for their meagre
maintenance; the output came to around 80% of the cost of
maintaining the camps. Such was the effect of slavery on the
people, mainly Japanese and German, who spring from nations
renowned for the intelligence, organization and general effici-
ency of their working people. Alex Adourian, now of Toronto,
experienced this paradox when he was a prisoner in a Soviet
camp in 1945-53. The guards told them in 1949 that now they
would be paid for their work. At the end of the first month, the
administration calculated that the prisoners owed them money.
They were forgiven the debt. J_3

In sub-camp 12 of the BAM-line, or the Baikal-Amur railway,
construction camps east of Lake Baikal in 1946, the prisoners
were led out one day in winter to a forest, where they were sup-
posed to survey the trees to be cut to help build the BAM
railway east from Baikal to the Amur river. A Soviet forestry
expert came to mark off with paint the tall straight trees to be
cut down. They were to be used for the construction of work
camps on the railway and for railway ties. After a week or so of
tree-marking by the Soviet expert, the prisoners were led out
with axes. They were guarded by NKVD troops numbering
about ten per hundred prisoners. The guards spread out in the
forest a great distance from the prisoners, so they were not aware
at first what was going on. The prisoners deliberately cut all the
crooked, useless trees. Once they were down, the useless trees
impeded all further work until moved. So the work was nearly
all wasted, and the railway slowed down. The prisoners were not
punished because they pretended it was a mistake. And they had
actually cut their 'norma' or norm for the period, so it did not
matter. Such things as these helped keep production so low that
the Soviets would have been better off without the Gulag.
NKVD statistics show that the output of the camps (lumber,
housing, coal, gold, high-tech construction such as telephone
exchanges) was, in 1946, around 75% of the cost of the camps
in guard wages, food, clothing and supplies. By 1948 this had
improved to over 85%, but in all the years of measuring the
output never exceeded the cost. The prisoners were being sub-
sidized to stay there. It was in effect free lodging, a holiday in
hell.

Allied support for the Soviets had still not been entirely cut
off as late as 1948, for returned prisoners of war have reported
that they were still building the BAM line with steel rails
marked 'Made in Canada'. 14

One or two of the camps such as Krasnogorsk, west of Moscow,
were re-education centres where likely candidates were sent
during the war to be retrained into communist ideology. This
was the brainwashing later made infamous in Korea. A famous
German General 'graduate' from Krasnogorsk, Field Marshal
Paulus, had fought hard for the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad. An-

other was a fighter pilot, Heinrich von Einsiedel, of a famous
aristocratic German family. Men who later became leaders of
East Germany were trained here. The camp was comfortable,
well run, efficient, successful. Both Japanese and Germans
were indoctrinated in communist ideology in these camps, then
sent home to help bring about the communist revolution. (The
British maintained similar camps in the UK after the war. Some
primitive re-education was also done in Canada.) 14

The labour of the prisoners not only cost the USSR a subsidy,
the prisoners themselves endangered the USSR in the end,
because they left the USSR with valuable information. Many
Japanese and German prisoners were interviewed by officers of
the United States Air Force, who were looking for information
about the location, size, dispersal, importance and purpose of
factories, bridges, airports, railways and so forth in the USSR.
The prisoners in the end were converted into spies. Thousands
of these reports, a monument to the Cold War, are stored to this
day in American archives in Washington.

The full story of the Gulag for foreign prisoners has not yet
been told, although Solzhenitsyn has told of the sufferings in the
Gulag for Soviet citizens. The general impression in the Western
mind is that life in the Gulag was one of unvaried suffering
under a relentless cruelty, but that is not the full story. Let us add
to our existing picture of the Gulag some stories of a kind we
have not heard before. j_5

One of the happier Japanese prisoners rolling home to Japan
in August 1945 was a young man named Makoto, native of a
very old district of Tokyo, Eddoko. Makoto was drafted at the
age of twenty in 1945, then sent with no military training at all
to the Kwantung Army in Manchuria. Smart, cheerful, quiet,
Makoto got on well, though he was absolutely bewildered by the
soldier's life. He was taken prisoner by the Russians along with
about 640,000 others, and soon put in a locked car in a train their
guards said was headed back to the Pacific and home. Makoto
had the upper bunk of an ancient Tsarist prison car called a
Stolypin car. There was a tiny window. He called out to the
others what he could see as the train rumbled through the
Russian forest. When they got to the edge of the ocean, they

were permitted to run down to the water. Some tasted it, and
found it was sweet, fresh water. Lake Baikal, thousands of
kilometres from the sea. The Russians laughed and laughed.

Makoto was then shipped towards Karaganda far to the west,
where he was put in a labour camp along with many Europeans.
Makoto worked in the camp office, where he noticed that one of
the Russian officers in charge of the camp's books was illiterate.
Makoto taught himself Russian and soon took over the officer's
duties for him. He was invited to the officer's home for dinner.
The officer told him he was having marital troubles and asked
for advice. Makoto obliged. He said that life in that Russian
camp was better than in his district of Tokyo during the war.

Makoto's experience parallels that of a German soldier, Fred
Pichler, who was kept in a remarkably open prison in Moscow
after the war. Pichler, now of Grafton, Ontario, was walking
along the street in Moscow one day in 1946 with his Soviet
guard and other prisoners, en route to build houses. He was
accosted by a young Russian woman who asked him to come
into her house nearby. He asked permission of the guard, who
smiled and said yes.

Pichler went in and the woman showed him a framed photo-
graph standing on a table of himself in Russian uniform. As-
tounded, he asked how she had gotten it. She said that it was
her husband, who looked exactly like him. She asked him if he
would visit her and her two-year-old son who constantly asked
when Daddy was coming home. Pichler was to pretend to be the
boy's father. (They were by now speaking English to each other
- she was an English teacher, and he had learned English in
Germany before joining up.)

Fred Pichler did visit her many times, with permission, playing
Daddy. This went on for over a year, until he was released.
Pichler was eighteen years old, and very innocent, so there was
no question of sex. Since leaving the USSR, he has made repea-
ted efforts to find the young mother, without success. He has
said, T love those people,' meaning the Russians. 'I keep them
close in my heart.'

The KGB generated millions of pages of detailed records of
these people, from captivity to release or death. The documents
are all still stored in a tall gloomy building in Moscow called the
Central State Special Archive, or CSSA. So secret that it was
fronted by a different building, and accessible only to a very few
scholars and apparatchiks, the CSSA contained millions and
millions of documents recording everything significant that went
on in the prisoner of war Gulag. After the Soviets fell, and the
CSSA archives were opened under the new democratic regime,
I visited them in 1992. 1 was allowed to walk up and down the
gloomy aisles and to take down at random any box I liked, to
read its contents through my Canadian interpreter, to photocopy
the documents, which I did, and to take them to Canada, where I
now have scores of them.

I found gifts to Stalin from the prisoners who were hoping to
get home sooner by fawning on their tormentor. There were silk
banners with flattering poems to the great anti-fascist hero em-
broidered in red and gold, intricately carved boxes of mahogany,
paintings, beautiful inlaid boxes, books of drawings, scrolls. On
one shelf, it was rumoured, the Soviets preserved Hitler's teeth.
And there were fantastically detailed records of the prisoners'
fate.

A personal dossier was kept for each prisoner, recording his
unit, name, serial number, date of capture, medical and legal
history. One dossier included an X-ray of a broken bone mended
in hospital in 1946. The dossier of an Austrian prisoner, the
famous biologist Konrad Lorenz, is particularly thick, including
descriptions of some of the scientific work he was able to carry
out in camp. The dossiers average around twenty pages per
prisoner. Some are over 200 pages long.

Here also lies the proof of certain crimes committed by the
Western powers beginning with their co-operation with Stalin in
1941. These are Western crimes which are being covered up
even now, by the governments of France, the UK, the US and
probably Canada, with the help of some TV producers, some
academics, archivists, editors and writers.

Since a clear understanding of the Western leaders' duplicity
depends in part on the accuracy of certain documents in the
Soviet archives, it is essential to compare their version of
important events with what is known or believed in the West.
Immediately, the reaction of most Westerners will be, 'How can
one trust Soviet records, knowing that the Soviet system nor-
mally depended on mass deception?' This is a main reason that
the Soviet archives are dependable. Virtually all the Soviet lying
went on outside the archive. Soviet archives could safely record
the truth because they were top secret, available only to the top
members of the regime.

As General Dmitri Volkogonov has written, Lenin began the
practice, enforced rigidly for seventy years, of storing most
important documents recording Soviet actions and policies, no
matter how brutal. 16 Thus the paradox foreshadowed by George
Orwell became reality: what the people knew was not true, what
was true was not known. This dizzying paradox was not un-
known in the West at the time of Watergate, of the bombing of
Cambodia, of the French atrocities in Indo-China and Africa, of
the UK police actions in Northern Ireland, the arms sales to Iraq
in the 1980s, of Canadian war crimes in Somalia, and so on.

Many of the statistics of the Gulag kept in the CSSA support
both the picture of terrible suffering and of a strange but endu-
rable prison-society whose major fault was captivity, much
like the common picture of a Western jail.

What objective tests can we apply to the accuracy of these
statistics? The most impressive evidence of the accuracy of the
NKVD records is the story of the documents recording the
Katyn massacre. In April 1940, the Red Army slaughtered many
thousand Polish officers taken prisoner during the Soviet attack
on Poland in 1939. This massacre was of course hidden from the
local population, and from other units of the army and the
NKVD. Records of the slaughter were routinely made and sent
to Moscow.

After the Germans invaded Russia, the surviving Poles became
the allies of their captors. Released from prison to help form a
Polish army to fight the Germans, the Polish General Anders

met Stalin in Moscow. Unaware of the fate of the missing
officers, Anders asked Stalin face to face to return them. Stalin
dissimulated. Anders pressed the point, sending one of his staff
officers all over the USSR to search for the missing men. 17
They found nothing definite, but vague, disquieting rumours. At
first the Poles thought that some 3,000 had been massacred; later
they suspected it was more, perhaps as many as 15,000.

After the Germans took the Katyn region and discovered some
of the mass graves, they held an investigation that showed that
the Soviets were guilty. When the Polish refugee government in
London asked the International Red Cross to investigate, the
Soviets broke diplomatic relations with them. After the Red
Army retook Katyn, the Soviets held their own commission
which found the Soviets innocent and the Germans guilty. But
the German evidence of Soviet guilt was so compelling that both
Churchill and Roosevelt covered it up as a matter of policy.
Churchill told Roosevelt that the massacre had been committed
by the Russians, and advised him to keep this secret. An Ame-
rican friend of President Roosevelt, Ambassador Earle, showed
the President proof that the Soviets were guilty, but following
Churchill's advice, the President forbade him to publish it. j_8
And the Katyn massacre was a massacre of Poles, who were
allies of the West. It was to defend these people that Britain
and France had gone to war against Hitler.

At the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1945- 46, the Soviets
presented a case against the Germans so absurd, based on fumb-
ling witnesses who muffed their rehearsed lines and a clumsy
forgery of evidence, that the Americans and British were able to
persuade them to withdraw it. For fifty years Soviets from the
lowest to the highest positions lied, deceived, dissimulated,
hypocritically accused others, offended friends, made new ene-
mies, murdered those who told the truth and lost face while the
world argued over, and suspected, who had killed the prisoners
of Katyn. And for fifty years, the NKVD document ordering the
death penalty for the Katyn prisoners lay on the shelves of the
archives in Moscow, along with letters and memos ordering the
subsequent cover-up. 19

In the same archive were other papers showing that Molotov,
Kaganovich and Stalin had ordered the execution of 38,679
army officers, poets, writers and apparatchiks in 1937 and '38.
20 Surely, if the Soviets were ever going to falsify documents,
it would have been those ones. And they remained, intact,
accurate, damning.

A war crime in which the British collaborated with the Soviets
was hidden by both powers in 1945 and for long after. In fact,
the British government and one officer, Lord Aldington, are
still denying responsibility. In 1945, the British delivered thou-
sands of prisoners of Russian nationality, including women
and children, into Soviet hands in the full knowledge that the
Soviets would shoot the leaders and enslave the rest. These
people were ethnic White Russians who had fought the Soviets
as allies of the British during the Russian Civil War. They fled
Russia before the Soviets could catch them at the end of the
war, so they had never been Soviet citizens.

Stalin had no legal rights to many of these people, and no moral
right to any of them. But the British delivered them anyway, in
scenes of dreadful suffering and protest so grotesque that very
soon the British soldiers were rebellious and their officers feared
they would not be able to deliver any more prisoners. 2J_

All this was revealed a few years ago in several books and a
pamphlet by the renowned British author Count Nikolai Tolstoy,
to the amazement and fury of high officials of the British govern-
ment. They immediately closed ranks against the author, who
says that they committed or procured perjury and illegally
sequestered documents in order to help Lord Aldington succeed
in a libel action against Tolstoy.

Tolstoy, along with a few others in the West, was relieved when
many of the Soviet archives were at last opened by first Mikhail
Gorbachev and then Boris Yeltsin. With the opening of the Soviet
Red Army archives, important elements proving his case were re-
vealed. Tolstoy flew to Moscow and found there documents 'of
central importance 1 to his case, proving that 5 Corps command,
of which Lord Aldington (formerly Brigadier Toby Low) was
Chief of Staff, entered into a secret agreement with the Soviets to

hand over thousands of White Russian emigres from Western
Europe who had sought refuge in Austria. This action violated
orders received from the Allied High Command, which under
the terms of the Yalta Agreement restricted forced repatriation
to Soviet nationals. The victims included a large number of
women and children, and the operation was carried out in vio-
lation of the Geneva Convention. 22

Records recently revealed in the Soviet archives

The Soviets captured on their European front 3,486,206 pris-
oners from seventeen countries, according to the vast Soviet
archive. The authoritative book on the subject, edited by G. F.
Krivosheyev, shows that the Soviets captured 2,389,560 German
soldiers between 22 June 1941 and 9 September 1945. Of these,
450,600 died. Of these, 356,687 died in rear camps run by the
NKVD, and a further 93,900 died en route from the front to the
rear camps. 23 A further 271,672 civilians were rounded up and
termed internyrovannye, of whom 66,481 died. 24

The Soviet records are extremely precise. For instance, the
356,687 German rear-camp dead are tallied separately from the
deaths of ethnic Germans (from, for example, other European
countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia) and also from
Austrians. In these latter categories 21,603 dead were entered.

The Russian Army military historian Andrei Kashirin also
concluded that these figures from the CSS A archive were gen-
erally correct. In his opinion, the deaths totalled 423,168. 25

The total deaths among the European prisoners between 1941
and 1952 is 518,480. Of those transported to the Soviet Union,
all the names were recorded, with biographical data, date and
place of capture, plus labour and medical records and death
certificates for the dead. The Russians of today have nothing to
hide.

It is now possible for the first time since 1945 to fit these
records together with the German records to determine the
number of German prisoners who died in Western camps.

Beginning in 1948, German civil authorities in the American
and British zones began to survey the country to determine how
many prisoners were still in captivity or missing, not accounted
for. The work went on for several years until October 1951,
when the new West German government under Chancellor
Konrad Adenauer deposited in the UN a nominal roll of over
1,100,000 names of soldiers still missing, presumed to be
captive, according to the survey. In addition to the soldiers,
another 300,000 paramilitary personnel and civilians had been
taken. Most of the civilians had been seized by the Russians as
substitutes for prisoners who had escaped during transport. The
survey was about 94% complete in the three Western zones, but
only about 30% complete in the Soviet zone ('complete 1 means
100% of the households in the area were surveyed. For more
detail see Appendix 7). In effect it was saying that over 1.1
million German soldiers died in captivity, plus the missing
a 500,000 paramilitaries and civilians. No one before 1989
could account for more than 24,000 of these. Close to one
and a half million Germans are still officially missing in 1997.

Subtracting the proven Soviet deaths of Germans from the West
German survey of the missing, we see that somewhere between
750,000 and 1,000,000 must have died in other camps, Polish,
Yugoslavian, American and French. By far the greater number
were held in and died in American and French camps. Approxi-
mately 600,000 to 900,000 died in American and French capti-
vity. Many other Axis prisoners died in Western camps.

Thus the Soviet figures completely support figures published
in Other Losses in 1989, before the Soviet archives were opened
to the West. The research in the West has proven, independently
of the Soviet figures, the death total in the West. It is also true
that the figures published in Other Losses in 1989 predicted
what would be found in the Soviet archives if they should ever
be opened. The prediction has proven true.

Both sides in the Cold War proved equally cynical in their lies
about the prisoners. At first they simply covered up their own
atrocities, but then they began to use the dead prisoners as
medieval armies had once hurled corpses into besieged cities to
spread plague. A typical exchange occurred during the first few

years of the Cold War. Following American and British charges
that the Soviets had abused their Japanese prisoners, the Soviets
replied with accusations that the British and Americans had
abused theirs. The Soviets upped the ante by throwing in char-
ges against the Australians as well. 26

The UK representative in the UN's Third Committee, dealing
with prisoners of war, 'charged that the USSR had not only
violated specific agreements but had also infringed on the
general principle to which it had subscribed by signing the
Geneva Convention . . .' Using very incorrect figures, the UK
representative ended by saying that the Soviets still had almost
two million German prisoners of war. (At that point, according
to the NKVD records in the CSS A, the Soviets had well under
one million.) A 'voluntary registration carried out by the
Government of the Federal Republic of Germany ending in
March 1950' showed that 1,154,029 West Germans were still
missing from their homes. A further 8,972 had similarly been
listed by a registration of the people of the Soviet Zone of
Occupation. 'The last news of some 923,000 of that figure had
come from the USSR or areas occupied by Soviet troops.' 27
Thus the British lodged in the public mind the conviction that
the nefarious Soviets were responsible for deaths that had
actually occurred in the camps of Britain's friends, France
and America.

Among the signal facts left out by the UK representative was
that far more than 1,154,029 prisoners were missing from their
homes, because the German survey was incomplete. As the
disproportionately low return from East Germany shows, the
West German survey covered mainly West Germans missing,
not those from other areas, such as the lost German territories to
the east, Romania, Italy and other important German allies. 28

Far worse was the omission of the central fact that the so-
called 'last news' from the 'missing' Wehrmacht soldiers was
mainly an anti-Soviet fiction generated by the Allies themselves.
This is clear from the statements of one of the senior German
researchers, Dr Margarethe Bitter, who said of the survey done
by the Ausschufi fur Kriegsgefangenenfragen that the estimates
of the location of soldiers who had gone missing were 'more or

less theoretical calculations'. 29 This same flaw was reported
clearly in the book Gesucht Wird by Kurt W. Boehme, showing
that over 62% of the last postal addresses of missing Germans
had been recorded in 1944, or even as long ago as 1943. 30
Given the panicky flight of Germans to the West at the very
end of the war, which is apparent in the total capture figures
of the Allies, these last addresses' are worthless. The Western
Allies took in a total of about 8,000,000 German soldiers and
civilians compared with about 2,600,000 Germans captured by
the Soviets. Thus the Western Allies had taken around 73% of
the total prisoner catch, of whom they had so far recorded only
around 24,000 dead. They were accusing the Soviets of 99%
of the purported deaths (or 'missing').

The defenders of Eisenhower and De Gaulle allege that the
Adenauer government report showed that most of the missing
prisoners were last seen on the Eastern Front and died in Soviet
camps. This lie is being repeated even in the 1990s. For instance,
the German historian Major Rudiger Overmans said on page 159
of Eisenhower and the German Prisoners of War that, 'Three-
quarters of the disappeared were registered in the USSR or
eastern or south-eastern Europe.'

I interviewed Dr Margarethe Bitter of Munich, who founded
the committee that began the work which culminated in the
Adenauer government's report. 31 She told me that it was not
true that the committee determined the location of the missing
prisoners. She said, We did not know where the missing prisoners
were.' Dr Bitter said this twice, once on the phone in French and
then in person voluntarily into a tape-recorder in her apartment in
Munich, in English and in front of a witness, in June 1991. 32
Furthermore, in concentrating as they did only on missing Ger-
mans, the Western apologists were ignoring millions of prisoners
from Hungary, Italy, Austria, Romania and ten other European
countries who fought alongside the Germans. Of these, hundreds
of thousands never returned home.

Now that the KGB archives openly refute the lies of Western
propagandists, Allied apologists cast doubt on the KGB's accu-
racy. They say that the Red Army did not record their captures at
the front, but only in the rear camps. This they believe shows that

the missing German prisoners, who they maintain went missing
on the Eastern Front, were never acknowledged as captives by the
Soviets. They say that nearly all of them escaped or died en route
from the front to the rear camps. 33 As we have seen, this has
been totally disproven by the historian G. F. Krivosheyev in his
book Without the Seal of Secrecy, but once again, Western apolo-
gists prefer their 'estimates' to the hard evidence.

These same apologists also say that the Americans captured
fewer prisoners than appear in American records. The effect of
this is that the fewer the Americans took, the fewer could have
died. Major Overmans, writing for the American professor
Stephen E. Ambrose, who adores Eisenhower, claimed that the
Americans took only 3.8 million German prisoners, 34 whereas
in fact the Americans in north-west Europe alone took 5,224,310
prisoners of all nationalities, according to SHAEF documents
which have already been published. The Americans also took
hundreds of thousands more prisoners in North Africa and Italy.
Of the total - approximately six million - about 85% were German,
making a German total of more than five million. In fact, one
senior US Army historian has written that the holdings of Ger-
mans in US camps in the summer of 1945 was 7,005,732. 35

The effect of understating the prisoner catch of course is to
minimize the deaths for which the army could be held respon-
sible. 36 Also, by limiting their defence of the army only to
German prisoners, the defenders of Eisenhower and De Gaulle
conveniently set aside the hundreds of thousands of Italians,
Romanians, Hungarians and so on who also were held in lethal
conditions for a long time. Many among these died as well.

Major Overmans, because of his high position in the historical
service of the Bundeswehr, is an official spokesman for the
German government on this subject, but it is clear that his un-
documented assertions about American captures are contra-
dicted by the prime source in American army documents.

It is equally clear from Soviet records that the Soviets, for an
important part of the war, took into their rear (MVD) camps
more prisoners than the Germans thought they had lost. This
discovery destroys one of the prime sources used by Western

propagandists during the Cold War, the series of books on war
prisoners edited by Erich Maschke and published under the
control of the German government as the final official statistical
summary. 37

Maschke says that the Soviets still held alive 559,142 Germans
at the end of 1944. He further estimated that by the end of April
1945, some 549,000 had died among all the prisoners caught to
date. Adding the two together, we see that according to Maschke
it is not possible that the Germans captured by the end of 1944
exceeded 1,108,000, whereas the Soviets actually recorded
1,248,000 Germans captured. 38 And of course, not all the
549,000 who eventually died, according to Maschke, had died
by the end of 1944. For our purposes, to illustrate the impossibi-
lity of Maschke's estimates, we will take an estimate of 300,000
dead for the end of 1944. On this basis, the true comparison for
the end of 1944 should be about 859,000 Germans captured,
according to Maschke, as against 1,248,000 actually taken
according to the Soviets.

Much more important for history is to compare the figures for
missing shown in the OKW war diary with the Soviet actual
capture figures. The OKW recorded on 31 January 1945 that the
missing on the Eastern front totalled 1,018,365, whereas we
have seen that the Soviets recorded 1,248,000 captured a whole
month previously. 39 Clearly, the Soviet figures are more depen-
dable than even the OKW war diaries. For other periods of the
war in the east, the results are similar. The Soviets consistently
reported more prisoners taken than the OKW reported to be mis-
sing. In Soviet hands, there were no unreported prisoners, so
there could have been no deaths of unreported prisoners. 40

On the Western Front, the picture is far different. The Americans
themselves, from Major General Milton A. Reckord to Colonel
Philip Lauben, say that they failed to account for many scores
of thousands of German prisoners both in transit and even while
they were held infixed camps. In one train transfer, over 20%
of the Germans were missing. In one takeover of camps by the
French from the Americans, according to Lauben, it was possible
that as many as 105,000 prisoners were missing out of 275,000
previously reported by the same Americans. 4J_

The general truth of the Soviet capture records is confirmed
in detail by the experience of Panzer commander Colonel Hans
von Luck, a colleague and friend of Stephen E. Ambrose. Von
Luck was captured by the Soviets in the winter of 1944- 45,
ordered by the Soviets to assume responsibility for disciplining
his men and marched with them to the rear camp near Dresden.
En route, some Germans escaped, but as Von Luck wrote, 'The
guards threatened to shoot me if further prisoners were to
escape. But what was worse, they fetched civilians at random
from the nearby villages to make up the number ... I did not
know unfortunately that the number of prisoners to be delivered
had been precisely determined . . .' 42

The Red Army practice was to telephone the numbers from the
army camp to the NKVD rear camp ahead of time, which Von
Luck did not know. Captain Harry G. Braun of the German
navy also observed the same practice. Braun was captured by
the Soviets near Stettin in the summer of 1945. He escaped
through the bush, afraid that the Soviet guards would 'come
back with a search party, maybe even with bloodhounds. It
wasn't until much later that we found out we had no cause to
worry. It was common practice for the Russians to simply go to
the next village, grab the first two warm bodies they came across
and then arrive at their destination with the correct number of
prisoners.' 43 This practice of the Soviets was also confirmed by
Captain Galitski during a historical conference in May 1996, at
Massey College in Toronto. That the Soviets lost hundreds of
thousands of prisoners to death between capture and first docu-
mentation, thus accounting for most of the missing prisoners, is
clearly a fantasy. Yet it is advanced to this day by historians of
nominal repute who, when asked, admit they have no documen-
tary sources whatsoever. 44

Another proof of the KGB accuracy is the record of the fate of
the German civilians who were taken away as reparations slaves
to the Gulag in 1945. During the Cold War, the German govern-
ment found itself unable to believe the reports of the Soviet
government on the subject, so they laboriously surveyed the
families and published the results of the civilian study in a mas-
sive book entitled The Expulsion of the German Population from
the Territories East of the Oder-Neisse Line. 45 They concluded

that the Soviets had deported some 218,000 civilians to the
Gulag as slaves. Deaths were suspected by the Germans to be
about 20,000. However, as we saw above, when the NKVD/
MVD/KGB archives on prisoners of war were opened recently,
the Soviet documents showed that 271,672 people in this category
had been deported, of whom a huge number, 66,481, had died. 46
Here was another Soviet atrocity suspected in the West, and con-
firmed in the Soviet archives. The great significance of this is that
we now know that the Germans and Soviets agree that the Soviet
records are authentic on the subject of German prisoners .

The Red Cross and the names

The Russian Red Cross has over the last twenty years responded
to 500,000 requests from German families inquiring about the
fate of their men, who they supposed had been taken to the
Soviet Union. Using the KGB records, the Russians were able to
trace 50,000 prisoners and report their fate. The Japanese have
been given similar data for 62,000 of their prisoners. German
researchers have been at work in the CSSA archive since 1991,
transcribing data for millions of prisoners from the original
Russian into German. 47 No such information is available in
American, French, Canadian, Swiss or British archives.

Documents about the fate of some 640,000 Japanese prisoners
taken by the Red Army in Manchuria in August 1945 have a
significant relation to the fate of the German prisoners in the
hands of the Western powers, because they provide another
chance to determine the general accuracy of KGB prisoner
records.

In at least thirty-five central camps already identified, Japanese
prisoners were kept alongside German and other European
prisoners. It is highly significant that the death rate reported by
the KGB among the Japanese and German prisoners from 1945
onwards was almost exactly the same. For the Japanese the rate
was about 9.6% [full term] and for the Germans 9.4%. As we
shall see below, the death rate among the Japanese was reported
correctly by the KGB, according to the Japanese themselves.
This provides even more evidence of the accuracy of the KGB
figures for deaths among Germans after 1945.

Because the Japanese were kept by the same MVD camp system
under the same conditions and in many of the same camps as the
German and other European prisoners after August 1945, the fate
of the Japanese must be very similar to that of the Germans and
other Europeans after August 1945. The fate of the Japanese pri-
soners has been determined by the Japanese themselves, which
enables us to give a definite answer to the question, is that fate
accurately described in the Soviet documents?

Beginning about two years after the war, Japanese families
began asking when their missing men were coming home. The
US military government of Japan, the US State department, and
the Japanese, British and Australian governments berated the
Soviets for enslaving a million or more Japanese prisoners of war
during 1945- 50. They accused the Soviets of hiding the fate of
these prisoners because they were slaves, or else slave soldiers
impressed into the Red Army to wage war against the democra-
cies. The Japanese and Americans said at various times that some
300,000 to 500,000 prisoners were 'missing' or 'not accounted
for', in Soviet camps. They hinted strongly that most were dead.
The Soviets angrily denied this, saying that only 10,627 had
died. 48 They then fired back the charge that around 100,000
Japanese POWs had died in American, British and Australian
camps. The Japanese produced for the UN a list of 253,000
'known dead', whereupon Jakob Malik, the Soviet Ambassador to
the UN, denounced the Japanese. Huge rallies gathered in Tokyo,
and General Douglas MacArthur, the American commander, said
that the missing prisoners were 'the most serious concern' he had
ever had in his years of rule in Japan. 49

Just as they had lied to the public about Katyn for many years,
the Soviets kept their records secret while they lied about the
deaths of Japanese in their camps. For instance, having said in
1950 that some 3,800 Japanese prisoners died, a few years later
they amended this to the much higher figure of 30,000.

However, by careful interrogation of returning Japanese prisoners
over many years, the Japanese themselves gradually determined
by 1960 that of the 640,000 soldiers in the Kwantung army taken
prisoner, some 62,000 had died. 50 The British, Americans and

Australians meanwhile contended in the UN and other places
that millions had been taken and many hundreds of thousands
had died.

After glasnost, Russians working in the Soviet archives found
the death certificates and personal dossiers for the prisoners. The
deaths recorded there numbered about 62,000. Mikhail Gorbachev
in April 1991 and Boris Yeltsin in 1994 each gave the figure of
62,000 to the Japanese government with an apology, and Yeltsin
provided a list of the names of those who died. The list and expla-
nation were accepted with thanks by the Japanese. 5J_

As the propaganda missiles roared round the world for forty years,
these separate records lay undisturbed in the archives in Moscow,
Tokyo and probably Washington. And the amazing thing was,
these records agreed that 62,000 had died.

And for forty years, no one said so.

In sum, then, these tremendous Soviet archives report in great
detail the fates of three ranks of prisoner from twenty-five coun-
tries through fifteen years. They are by far the most valuable,
precise and comprehensive documents ever discovered in any
archive in the world about the fate of prisoners of the Second
World War. We know they are reliable because they fit all other
known evidence, explain Western historical lacunae, are sup-
ported by millions of subsidiary documents, and are confirmed
by German, Polish and Japanese reports. Most important, they
were kept secret for over forty years because the Soviet leaders
feared them. And this was because they believed them. They
recorded a huge atrocity committed against many nations. 52

In contrast, in the West, it is admitted by archivists and historians
that the Western archives have been weeded of revealing mate-
rial. 53 There are no personal dossiers for any prisoners anywhere
in the West. The British government withheld documents such as
the Phillimore Report from this author when he was researching
the Germans in British camps. 54 The Canadian archives contain
complaints by the former Empress Zita of Austria that the Cana-

dian troops were behaving like Nazis towards Austrian priso-
ners in the camp at Aurich. But there are no records of any
investigation, just a routine high-level denial that is contradic-
ted by an unpublished Canadian army report. This frankly
records 'indescribable filth' in the latrines, complete lack of
utensils in the kitchens, 'extremely cold' conditions, and 'poor
health' among the prisoners, most of whom had been taken
from hospital. 55 As we have already seen, the International
Red Cross has several times refused this author access to their
Second World War files while admitting three other writers.
Following reports in 1991 of atrocities in French camps in 1946,
the death records in the archive of the town of Labouheyre were
closed to historians. They had previously been open for 50 years.
These are only a few of the many examples of how a vast inter-
national falsification has been maintained for fifty years. Some-
times the Allies have lied in co-operation with the Soviets,
sometimes they have lied to foment hatred of them, sometimes
they have lied to cover up their own crimes. They are still at it.

Since there is no doubt of the veracity of the Soviet records,
and no doubt as to the veracity of the German reports of the
missing, we are led inevitably to conclude that the 1.4/1.7
million known missing German soldiers did not die in the Soviet
camps as previously alleged. When the 450,000 German deaths
in Soviet hands are subtracted from the overall total of 1.4/1.7
million missing prisoners, 56 we see that the deaths not in the
Soviet camps must have been at least one million.

The Cold War is over, the Russians are telling the truth, but in
the West, the lying continues. In the last few years, dozens of
articles, hours of TV film and two books have been published
which perpetuate this cover-up. This is undoubtedly the longest
running big lie in the history of the Western democracies.

* *

CHAPTER 5
And The Churches Flew Black Flags

'The Morgenthau Plan was conceived in sin, died at birth
and lived to a ripe old age. '

ANONYMOUS

Two contradictory Allied policies began to operate simul-
taneously in Germany in the spring of 1945. The dominant
policy was vengeance through imposed starvation; the subsidiary
policy was relief through imports of food to ward off threats to
the occupying armies. The victorious Allies began to punish the
Germans for their crimes as soon as the Germans had surrendered.
Among the many fantastic crimes of Germany - against Jews,
socialists, Christians, Polish intelligentsia, homosexuals - one of
the worst was their treatment of the Dutch, whose country they
had cruelly invaded in 1940.

One of the reasons for the Dutch famine has never been fully
told in the West, perhaps because it is discreditable to Winston
Churchill. He imposed a blockade in this war as he had tried to
do in 1917, because he believed that the relief proposed by
Hoover for the Belgians or Dutch would materially help the
Germans. But Churchill was ignoring Hoover's arrangements to
protect the food from possible German depredations. The food
would be sent by the ICRC in its own ship, guarded through the
journey to Belgium by neutral observers. It would be cooked
and eaten by the children in the presence of supervisors. And
finally, Hoover's master touch: the Germans agreed to match
pound for pound everything that Hoover could round up for
the starving. Not only would there be no gain to the Germans,
there would be a very slight loss. That the Germans were per-
fectly sincere in this is now certain because of the recent disco-
very of a secret German diplomatic telegram signed Albrecht in

Berlin to the German Embassy in Moscow in February 1941,
routinely informing them that the Hoover plan for aid 'against
starvation for Belgium has been thoroughly examined by the
German government and . . . agreed 1 . It continues: '. . . it was
assured that neither the food envisaged in the plan coming
from abroad nor food taken in a similar way from Belgium
would be requisitioned for the purposes of the occupying po-
wer [Germany] in Belgium. 1 The telegram referred with appa-
rent pride to the 'already successful deliveries of considerable
quantities of potatoes and cereal grains from Germany, which
under conditions of war constitute all the greater concession
since Belgium, in peacetime drew [much of] its food supplies
from overseas'. 1

All this was jettisoned by the British, who thereby inflicted no
harm at all on the German war effort. The people who suffered
most were the children in Belgium and Holland.

The situation changed towards the end of the war, as the Ger-
mans lost territory in the east. The Dutch grew short of food
because the Germans were taking so much away to feed their
soldiers and workers. By the end of the war in the spring of 1945.
the plight of the Dutch was so serious that the Allies threatened
the Germans with war crimes charges if they did not permit
Allied airlifts to cross their lines. This the Germans did, at the
order of their Nazi civilian commander, Arthur Seyss-Inquart. 2

Nevertheless, Seyss-Inquart was hanged at Nuremberg, for
earlier crimes against the Dutch. No secret was ever made of this
trial or execution; on the contrary, the record of the Nuremberg
trials was published in dozens of books in several languages.
The German crimes have been recorded in every possible way
as a warning against similar crimes. Only Hoover has recorded
that the mercy that the Allies had made possible in the First
World War was deliberately denied in the Second. Conven-
tional history has spared Roosevelt and Churchill all account
of this sad episode.

Even as the gallows at Nuremberg displayed their awful warning,
the Allies were depriving men, women and children in Germany
of available food. Foreign relief agencies were prevented from

sending food from abroad; Red Cross food trains were sent back
to Switzerland; all foreign governments were denied permission
to send food to German civilians; fertilizer production was
sharply reduced; and food was confiscated during the first year,
especially in the French zone. The fishing fleet was kept in port
while people starved. British soldiers actually blew up one
fishing boat in front of the eyes of astonished Germans. 'The
people say the sea is full of fish, but they want to starve us,'
said Burgomaster Petersen. 3 For several years after the Allied
conquest, the Germans subsisted on less food than the Dutch in
the hungriest time.

The judgement against Seyss-Inquart was, in sum, that he had
deprived the Dutch of food in order to further the German war
effort. Yet Churchill and many other Allied leaders also depri-
ved the Dutch of food, in order to further the Allied war effort.
4 Hoover wrote that his wartime efforts 'became a crusade on
my part against a senseless stone wall of opposition from Chur-
chill and Roosevelt . . . But we did keep some moral and spiri-
tual lamps alight among our own people during the eclipse of
human decency and compassion which swept over the world.'

Hoover went on: 'There were no insurmountable difficulties in
carrying out such relief [to Holland] except the attitudes of 'the
British and American governments. There was ample food sur-
plus in countries overseas from Europe. Shipping was available
without diminishing the transportation of the Allies.' 5

The measure of Churchill's cynicism is that in fact the British
and Canadians both broke the ban for sentimental or political
purposes. They sent food of course to their own men in Ger-
man prison camps, and also to Greece. The Canadians justified
sending food to the Greeks by saying that the help to the Ger-
mans (by reducing Greece's food demands) was minimal, and
at that time (1944- 45) the food was an important political wea-
pon. It was sent to help lure wavering Greeks to the British side
during the incipient struggle for power between left and right.
To put it more clearly, it was part of Churchill's plan to extend
and protect the Empire by dominating the Mediterranean sea.
Mackenzie King was deeply opposed to that, but he gave in
to Churchill.

The destruction caused by war had been amplified by the
scorched-earth policy of the Nazis in the last days of Hitler's
Reich, leaving huge disruptions which the occupying armies
tried to correct. A distinguished American member of Hoover's
Presidential Mission in 1947 observed, 'That within hours or
days a minimum of civil order was restored out of the complete
chaos and life kept going amidst the ruins; for this the German
people owe the Western victors a debt of gratitude which has
rarely been recognized in the distress and disappointment of the
following months and years.' 6 That the policy had been imple-
mented entirely for the convenience of the occupying armies
soon became evident to all Germans.

'From 1945 to the middle of 1948 one saw the probable col-
lapse, disintegration and destruction of a whole nation.' These
are not the words of a revisionist historian of the 1990s, but of an
American naval officer who watched German society collapsing
under Allied punishment in the Western zone. His papers have
very recently been opened to the public at the Hoover Institution
in Stanford. He is Captain Albert R. Behnke, USN MC, a medical
doctor, who compared the German civilians under the Allies with
the conditions in 'heroic Holland' under the Germans, and con-
cluded that 'Germany was subjected to physical and psychic
trauma unparalleled in history'. The Germans under the Allies
fared much worse than the Dutch under the Germans, and for
far longer. 'In the age group 20 to 39, for example, the average
[German's] body weight in January 1946 was 137.1 lbs . . . and
in December of 1947 it was 132.1 lbs. The average normal
weight for men of this group (stature 68 inches) is 154 pounds.'
Normal adult German consumers were rationed to 1,550 calories
per day (cpd), often receiving far less, whereas in Holland in
1943 they got 1,775 cpd. In 1944, the average Dutch ration
was 1,397 and in 1945 it was 1,556. In Germany, for years at
a time, the average official calorie ration under the British and
Americans was 1,550 per day - often not issued - and under
the French, for long periods, 1,400, and sometimes as little as
450. 7 The situation in the British zone was so bad in early 1946
that it drew an angry warning from the wartime hero, Field
Marshal Bernard Montgomery, commanding the British occupa-
tion in Germany. Montgomery sent a cable to the British Foreign
Office demanding immediate and substantial increases in imports,

with the warning that 'If we do not we shall produce death and
misery to an extent which will disgrace our administration in
history and completely stultify every effort which we are ma-
king to produce a democratic Germany. 1 8 In the British zone
for six months in the winter/spring of 1946-47, the ration was
around 1,000 cpd.

For long periods in the American zone, the ration was officially
1,275 calories per day. But it was well known that even the
official ration was not enough to support health. Herbert Hoover
told the President of the United States that 'the 1,550 ration is
wholly incapable of supporting health'. 9 One of the American
Mennonites who were trying to feed people in Germany com-
mented in March 1946 that, 'Only if we can be an instrument of
bringing food to these at our doorstep can we atone for the sin
of which we personally are a part.' 10

In the east of Germany in 1945, the people starved because the
Russians confiscated so much food and virtually all the factories.
The French took a terrible toll in their zone, by forced seizure of
food and housing, and by physical violence including mass
rapes, in Stuttgart and elsewhere. The famine went on for years.
The churches flew black flags. The children were too weak to
play. The official ration in the French zone in January 1947 was
450 calories per day, half the ration of the Belsen concentration
camp, according to the writer and theologian Prince zu Lowen-
stein. 11

The Allies had studied German food production during the war,
so they knew what to expect when they arrived. They knew for
instance that to strip off the rich farmlands of the east to give
them to the Poles and Russians deprived Germany of over 25%
of her arable land - this while most of the male labour force
was imprisoned, and the many other measures we have already
seen were imposed in order to reduce German food supplies.
Every hope of survival was reduced to the vanishing point for
millions of people. There was scant hope from the beginning of
the occupation that most of the Germans could survive for long
under Allied policies. J_2

It is possible that one of the reasons that prompted Eisenhower's
order banning civilian supply of the camps was the threat of a
food shortage. Eisenhower was concerned to control very strictly
the distribution of food, according to many historians. However,
many prisoners and German civilians saw the American guards
burn the food brought by civilian women. One former prisoner
described it recently: At first, the women from the nearby town
brought food into the camp. The American soldiers took every-
thing away from the women, threw it in a heap and poured
gasoline [benzine] over it and burned it. 1 J_3 Eisenhower himself
ordered that the food be destroyed, according to the writer Karl
Vogel, who was the German camp commander appointed by the
Americans in Camp 8 at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Although the
prisoners were getting only 800 calories per day, the Americans
were destroying food outside the camp gate.

To conserve food could scarcely have been the reason for the
order threatening death for civilians wishing to feed prisoners,
because the Allies' predominant policy in Germany for many
months was actually to reduce supplies of food destined for
German civilians, as well as prisoners. The rations were to be
held at the lowest possible level to 'prevent starvation', 14 or to
'prevent disease and unrest'.

Reparations also reduced the shrunken German food supply.
The Allies decided to take huge reparations, amounting to at
least twenty billion dollars. All used German prisoners as slave
labour, thus subtracting them from the labour force needed to
bring in the reduced harvest. The Western Allies had more than
three million prisoners in their camps in January 1946, purpor-
tedly working for them. Beyond that, about 650,000 Germans
had already starved to death in the Western Allied camps.
Hundreds of thousands had died in the Soviet camps, and
another million were enslaved there. German prisoners who had
worked as farm labourers in the UK and France have reported
their horror at arriving home in 1947 and 1948 to find their
families starving. 15 Unable to feed themselves adequately from
home production, the Germans were trying desperately to
increase production for export, but they were seriously hampered
by the Allied reparations policy. Even as late as 1949, the pace

of dismantling was still rising. In that year, 268 factories were
removed, in whole or in part. In the French zone, ten factories
were dismantled in 1946, nine in 1947, forty in 1948 and fifty
-one in 1949, of which thirteen were shipped whole to France.
In the previous three years, nine dismantled factories had been
sent to France. 16

The Poles, Czechs, Russians and others were driving about
14/15 million eastern civilians (expellees) into the occupied
remainder of the country. 17 By common Allied policy, no
Germans were permitted to emigrate until late 1949, so the
catastrophe was intensified, with no end in sight. j_8

One of the most harmful deprivations under the Morgenthau
Plan was the drastic reduction of German fertilizer production,
some of it on the grounds that nitrogen fertilizer can be diverted
to production of ammunition, some because they were by-pro-
ducts of steel and coal production, themselves severely reduced.
19 As we have seen, production of manufactured goods as well
as of food, fell drastically, partly as a result of this policy. 20
The total application of the three principal fertilizers dropped
from 2,113,000 tons in 1938- 39 to 782,000 tons in 1945- 46,
but the drop in effectiveness was greater than the loss of ton-
nage, as the effectiveness of the combination of the three ferti-
lizers is controlled by the amount of nitrogen. And this drop
was catastrophic, 82%, from 563,000 tons to 105,000. 21

The British and Americans, fearing 'disease and unrest 1 that
might imperil their armies, were forced to import large quantities
of food to maintain civil order. The military authorities thought
that if they did not do this, the communists would exploit the
situation to begin a revolution.

The British especially felt the load, because their zone received
more refugees than any other. Also, some of the grain they were
getting cheap or free from Canada for domestic use had to be
diverted to Germany, so their own ration was threatened. But not
nearly enough was sent to Germany. So it happened that the
Allies forced the Germans into starvation, and then in fear of
public reaction at home and of communist 'exploitation' in

Germany, fed them inadequately while complaining about the
cost. They then praised themselves for their generosity.

The famine that began in 1945 spread over all of occupied
Germany and continued into 1948. This was camouflaged as
much as possible by the various armies and governments.
American senators, churchmen and writers, British parliamen-
tarians and church leaders protested, at first to no effect, but
later with great success. The soldiers and politicians gradually
saw the sense of helping the Germans, who could then help to
rebuild Europe. And if West Germany did not starve, it would
cease to be a hindrance to the West.

Mixed in with this new attitude, like the salt in the porridge,
were the teachings that lie at the heart of Western democracy.
The ideas that it is best to forgive your enemy, love your enemy,
and do good to those who have hurt you, slowly blended into a
new policy which predominated in Allied council chambers and
in the ruins of Germany by 1950.

The expulsions

The fate of post-war Germany was largely settled at the Potsdam
conference in July to August 1945 by the three principal Allies,
the USSR, the USA and Great Britain. They were determined to
eliminate the German problem once and for all. One solution
was to weaken Germany by annexing her territory. British
Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and Franklin Roosevelt had
agreed years before Potsdam that Poland could have East
Prussia. 22 But this would mean that a discontented German
minority would be left behind, like the Sudeten Germans in
Czechoslovakia. Or else that the Allies would have to abandon
one major war aim - self-determination for all peoples. Roosevelt
abandoned the principle in a letter to the President of the Polish
Government in Exile in November 1944: 'If the Polish govern-
ment and people desire in connection with the new frontiers of
the Polish state to bring about the transfer to and from the terri-
tory of Poland of national minorities, the United States Govern-
ment will raise no objections and so far as is practicable will
facilitate such transfer.' 23

Notice

People selected for transport must leave their
homes in complete order. One piece of luggage
weighing 60 kilograms and hand baggage of a maxi-
mum of 10 kilograms will be allowed per person.

The remaining effects must be left where they
are in the home, e.g. curtains, carpets, table
lamps, wall mirrors, wash basins, pieces of fur-
niture, table cloths, 2 towels, and on the beds,
mattresses, bed linen and at least one pillow and
bedcover, all freshly made up.

Luggage must not be wrapped in carpets or
coverlets. If, on inspection, it is observed that
these instructions have not been obeyed, the person
concerned will not be taken on the transport but
sent to the interior to work.

Stalin was determined to retain the eastern section of Poland,
which he had seized under his secret agreement with Hitler in
1939. When the British and Americans ratified this seizure at
Potsdam, they were thus carrying out one of Hitler's foreign
policy aims. The nominal difference this time was that Poland
would be compensated for this loss: she got part of East Prussia,
East Brandenburg and Silesia. But in fact, the whole country was
turned into a province of the Soviet empire, and remained that
way for half a century.

So far as most Germans were concerned, Potsdam was a word
meaning mainly brutal expulsions of fourteen million or so people
from the eastern section of Germany, and the loss of 25% of the
country, including much of its best farmland. They were told that
the expulsions would be carried out in an 'orderly and humane
manner', in the soothing words of the victor.

What 'orderly and humane' meant was visible to the Canadian
army officer and writer Robert Greer when he visited Berlin in
late 1945:

There's something I must tell you about before I go to have
dinner. It's the worst of all. In driving about [Berlin] on
Sunday morning, we came to the Stettiner Bahnhof. It's a
complete wreck of course, the great arched glassway broken
and twisted. I went down to the ground level and looked.
There were people. Sitting on bundles of clothes, crouched
by handcarts and little wagons were people . . . they were all
exhausted and starved and miserable. You'd see a child
sitting on a roll of blankets, a girl of perhaps four or five, and
her eyes would be only half open and her head would loll
occasionally and her eyes blink slowly as though she were
only half alive. Beside her, her mother apparently, a woman
with her head on her outstretched arm in the most terrible
picture of despair and exhaustion and collapse I've seen.
You could see in the line of her body all the misery that was
possible for her to feel. . . no home, no husband, no food, no
place to go, no one to care, nothing nothing absolutely
nothing but a piece of the floor of the Stettiner Bahnhof and
a night of weary hunger. In another place, another woman,
sitting with her head in her hands . . . my God, how often
have I sat like that with my stomach sick within me and felt
miserable and helpless and uncaring . . . yet always I had
someone to help, or a bed to rest on and a meal to eat and a
place to go. For her there was nothing. Even when you see it
it's impossible to believe. What can you do when you have
nothing? Where can you go, what can you do, when you
have no strength left and hunger is a sickness in your belly?
God it was terrible.

Greer saw no men, only women and children. One of the boys
was so thin 'you could see the cords of his legs quite clearly. The
rest of the skin was tight about the bones. His face was expression-
less, his mouth hung open, he was bent with a large bundle, he
just tramped along behind the woman and followed where she led
with no real consciousness at all. Terrible, wasted half-dead people.
Alf took the boy out to the car and gave him bread and cocoa and
some stuff we had, and he took it with still no expression. He was
so hungry that even the sight of food didn't arouse him. As he left
one of the Germans in the crowd handed him a 20-mark note . . .
incredible encouraging touch. But the rest ... I wanted to run
from it all.

'That's some of it. The rest is like that ... all mixed up, all
different, yet all with the same terrible helpless almost hopeless
sense of destruction about it. British officers in the mess . . .
eating meat and cucumbers and lettuce and fried potato admit-
ting that they expected thousands to die this winter.' 24 And
these were the lucky ones.

The people Greer described had survived the expulsions in their
eastern homelands, where everything was even worse. Some of
it was described by the curate of the parish of Klosterbrbck in
Silesia, who observed in the summer of 1945 that, 'In every town
and village in Silesia, the Poles have affixed placards bearing the
words, "The harvest is like the seed.'" 25 The atrocities of the
Nazis would now be avenged by Polish atrocities.

In one Sudetenland village, all the German women were seized,
and their Achilles tendons were cut. As they lay on the ground
screaming, the Czech men raped them. Some of them were raped
many times in a day, day after day. Frau X's eighteen-year-old
daughter was raped about fifteen times every day for weeks. This
was what the Czechs, Poles and Russians did in 1945.

Hermine Muckusch, grandmother, of Jagerndorf in the Sudeten-
land of Czechoslovakia, saw scenes like this almost every day
in June and July of 1945 as she was herded west on foot with a
few belongings. Behind her lay her whole life, all her posses-
sions, her history, her friends, her relatives. She, her daughter
and two grandchildren were allowed to take almost nothing.
'It was a terrible sight which our transport now presented. The
young mothers with their children sat on the side of the road,
dirty and mainly without shoes, thirsty and emaciated. The
older children, red in their faces from fever and heat, lay in
the grass, asking for something to drink, which we were unable
to give them as the Czechs had made no arrangements what-
soever to look after these transports. It seemed that they had
deliberately omitted to supply food or drink so that people
should perish.' Women were shot at random by the guards, and
no medicine was available for them among the expellees. Her
mother and her own sister, hearing that the 'transport' was in
their village, came to see her. The guard pushed the great-

grandmother away brutally, threatened to beat her and sent her
away. That was how Muckusch said farewell to her mother and
her sister. She never saw them again. 26

When her grandson got fever, the Czech transport commander,
in her words, 'generously' gave her aspirin. In Spornhau, they
were led past a garden ficte of Czechs under a marquee tent
eating, drinking and playing band music, which showed her
poignantly how much the war had cost her - and might have
reminded her of similar scenes with the roles reversed when the
Germans had ruled here. That night they had to stay in a dirty,
bug-infested building with no latrine facilities. The people were
so exhausted that they literally lay down and died, in their own
excrement. 'No one who had been outside could go indoors
without horror.' At the beginning of the march, they had with
them twenty- seven children. Within fourteen days in the over-
crowded hospital, twenty-six children aged one year and under
had died. The one who lived was Wolfi, her youngest grandson.
'The bodies of the children were put in adult coffins, five to
seven in each, and buried together. They all died with their
eyes and mouths open and the certificates stated "starvation"
as the cause of death.' 27

After 9 May, when the Red Army marched into Pribram, one
of the women was told to go with a Russian soldier. She knew
what he would do, so she refused. He threw her out of the fourth
floor window, killing her. In the same camp, another woman
was seized and raped so often that she died. Her children were
watching and weeping beside her the whole time. In the trans-
port of 1,300 people who had left Pribram for Strahov, about
300 died in a few weeks that spring.

The death rate among the 9,000-10,000 people in the Strahov
stadium can be computed from the number of bodies seen by
the inmates every day. They averaged between twelve and
twenty per day. The death rate for a few weeks was therefore
between 43 and 81% per year. Among the people there was
a man with a tiny orphan in his arms. He had found the child
lying on his dead mother in a ditch. The author of this account
- one of many thousands taken in sworn depositions by the
Germans and others after the expellees reached Germany -

lost his father-in-law, his sister-in-law, and his fifteen-month old
son. He observed that although some Czechs wanted to help
these victims, anyone who brought food, shelter or medicine,
was shouted down as a Nazi by his fellow Czechs. This man,
Kurt Schmidt, was enslaved for a year in Czechoslovakia. He
almost died but was finally expelled to Bavaria. 28

The expulsions in the area round Aussig, Czechoslovakia were
deliberately compared to a notorious Nazi massacre by a Czech
official in the Czech Administrative Commission in Aussig. Wri-
ting in a Czech emigre magazine published in London in 1948,
he said that the Nazi massacre of Lidice 'lit a torch which roused
the whole civilised world against the cruellest [Nazi] tyranny and
the debased nature of a totalitarian regime. Truth and humanism
were on our side in the world when it happened. It was our right
and our duty as soon as the war was over to deal with the crimi-
nals who sinned against humanity. But our attempts to settle
accounts with these criminals have been over-shadowed by
even greater acts of inhumanity than those committed by the
Nazi gangsters. 1 He described one of those acts, committed by
Czech soldiers on a bridge over the Elbe who had been specifi-
cally ordered by their officers to refrain from attacking some
German civilians returning from work. They seized 'a mother
wheeling her child in a pram across the bridge and killed her
with sticks. Together with the child, she was thrown over the
railings into the Elbe whilst sub-machine guns fired at her. 1 29
A German who had spent four years in a concentration camp
for anti-fascist activities was scalped, shot through the stomach,
and died in the street. 'He died instantly. There were hundreds
of similar instances. Within three hours, more than 2,000 people
were murdered.' 30

A Catholic priest reported that the dead in Dubi near Kladno
were thrown into a coffin several at a time and emptied into a
pit in Rapice behind the wall of a cemetery. The coffin was
re-used. 31

The curate of the Parish of Klosterbrbck in Silesia observed of
the Poles and Russians, 'I have heard of cases where the Rus-
sians brutally raped mothers whilst their small children were
present. After that they took the children on their knee, gave

them bread and butter and sugar, and played with them. I am con-
vinced that the Russians would be quite different if there were no
bolshevism in their country. They are spiteful in a manner that is
different from that of the Poles. The maliciousness of the Polish
militia reminds one of the maliciousness of the German SS troops.
It is cold and venomous, whereas the Russian maliciousness is
somehow warm-blooded.' 32

But not all the Poles were like that. The priest at Dittersdorf, who
had befriended Poles during the German occupation, feeding and
clothing them, allowing them to attend services in his church
when this was forbidden by the Germans, was assaulted after the
war by Poles. One of these men who beat the priest half to death,
came to him two days later to apologize. He had tears in his eyes,
begging for forgiveness. The bandaged priest forgave him. 33

One man walking along the road near Lamsdorf with his family
was assaulted by Poles, who beat and robbed them. After many
incidents like this in the summer of 1945, seven of the eight
members of his family were dead. 34 The railway stations and
houses in Lamsdorf were posted with signs saying that the expul-
sions were to be carried out in 'an orderly and humane fashion'.

At Neisse in Upper Silesia, the village priest wrote, 'During the
first night of the Russian occupation, many of the nuns were
raped as many as fifty times. Some of the nuns who resisted with
all their strength were shot, others were ill-treated in a dreadful
manner until they were too exhausted to offer any more resis-
tance. The Russians knocked them down, kicked them, beat
them on the head and in the face with the butt-end of their
revolvers and rifles, until finally they collapsed and in this
unconscious condition became the helpless victims of brutish
passion, which was so inhuman as to be inconceivable. The same
dreadful scenes were enacted in homes for the aged, hospitals,
and other such institutions. Even nuns who were seventy and
eighty years old and were ill and bedridden were raped and ill-
treated by these barbarians. And to make matters worse, these
atocities were not committed secretly or in hidden corners but in
public, in churches, on the streets, and on the squares, and the
victims were nuns, women and eight-year-old girls. Mothers
were raped in the presence of their children, girls were raped in

front of their brothers, and nuns were raped in front of young
boys.' The Russians even went so far as to fuck their victims
when they were already dead. 'Priests who tried to protect the
nuns were brutally dragged away, the Russians threatening to
shoot them.' 35.

Germans who were still alive in the former eastern provinces
under Russians or Poles in 1945 faced one of several fates.*
Most of the soldiers were sent to prison camps in the Soviet
Union, although a few dozen thousand were held in camps in
Poland. Most of the civilians, nearly all women and children,
with a sprinkling of older men, were expelled from their homes
and homeland, usually under atrocious conditions, to starve in
shrunken Germany. Several hundred thousand people were
seized for slave labour in the USSR; many, as we have seen,
to replace Wehrmacht prisoners who had died en route from the
front to NKVD camps, or who had escaped. But many hundreds
of thousands of people were forced at gunpoint into former Nazi
concentration camps now run by Poles, there to suffer like those
people so recently persecuted and murdered by the Germans
themselves. Not only in Poland did such things happen, but in
virtually every nation in the east of Europe where ethnic Ger
mans were being expelled.

* Much remains to be revealed in Polish archives and among
Polish witnesses, who are invited to write to the author.

The fate of these German prisoners in Poland and elsewhere
has scarcely been described in historical literature. Polish histo-
rians have understandably been averse to this harrowing story
of vengeance. Not many Germans survived these camps to bear
witness. Those who did were so wounded by the experience that
they could scarcely bring themselves to speak about what had
happened to them. And if a survivor did attempt to tell others, he
was hampered not only by remembered terror, but by a lack of
documents, by incredulity, by cover-ups, by the widespread refu-
sal to believe in the post-war tragedy of the Germans that persists
to this day throughout the west. For instance, bones discovered in

1976 and 1981 in mass graves at Kaltwasser/Bromberg were
returned to the ground without any marker when it was decided
by a Polish commission investigating Nazi war crimes that the
dead had been German. 36 The investigation ended there. Ana-
logous incidents have occurred at Lambach in Austria and at
Rheinberg, Erfurt and Bretzenheim in Germany.

There were approximately 1,200 Polish camps east of the
Oder-Neisse line, where the children were separated from their
parents and all enslaved. According to one eye-witness who
survived, in the children's barracks at Potulitz (Potulice in
Polish), the death rate was very high. 37 The witness, Dr Martha
Kent, nee Schulz, was there from 1947 to 1949. She knew the
children and watched them die. At the end of two years, so
many children had died that the three-tier bunks were taken
away and replaced by single bunks, for the survivors. 'Not many
children left the barracks alive, but more were added,' Dr Kent
said recently. 'More were added than left alive.' It is therefore
quite likely that more than two-thirds of the children died in two
years. Her experience has been confirmed by the recent exten-
sive research of a German writer, who has described the deli-
berate starvation of newborn babies in Potulitz. Fifty German
women gave birth to fifty babies in one barracks, of whom forty-
six died within a few weeks. These were the babies of raping
Russians, who were succeeded by Polish men after autumn
1945. 38

Approximately 37,000 people were enslaved at Potulitz between
1945 and 1949. In Barracks 17, which held at various times
between 132 and 238 people, 744 people died in twenty months.
The two populations produce death rates between 176 and 318%
per year. 39 These rates are both much more than 100 times the
ambient Polish death rate. At Graudenz, 62% of the slaves died
in a single year, 1945. Overall at Potulitz, about 12,000 persons
died among a total pass-through of 37,000 in fifty-three months,
approximately six times the ambient Polish civilian death rate in
the same years 1945-50. 40

Dr Kent, an American citizen now living in Arizona, suffers the
reticence of all the survivors. She, her mother, younger brother
and sister, were sent to Potulitz from captivity in Busckowo. Her

grandmother was separated from the family in 1948, and they
never saw her again. Her father, older brother and sisters were
scattered to other concentration camps, where they endured
torture, beatings, and enslavement. Some prisoners were shot.

In 1948, the German children were joined by a new group of
healthy-looking girls who, to judge from their shining skin and
plump cheeks, had only recently entered Polish captivity. Each
of them wore a strange yellow device sewn on to her trouser-leg.
Young Martha Schulz, aged eight, whispered to her mother
through the barbed wire, 'Who are they?' Her mother replied with
a word that Martha did not understand, but thought meant some
special work group. Not until many years later, in North America,
when she saw her first pictures of the Jews victimized by Hitler,
did she realize the girls were Jews. 'It was as if the Poles had
learned only one thing from the Holocaust: to sew the Star of
David on to the legs as if to say, "You see, we're not like the
Nazis.'"

After Dr Kent was released, and had emigrated with some other
survivors, first to Canada and then to the USA, she found that
people refused to believe any stories about atrocities against
Germans by the Allies. Once, when she was a student at univer-
sity in the US, she approached a group of students conversing
with a professor. When Kent joined in, the professor said, 'Here's
our little Nazi. Sieg HeiV Her younger sister once spoke of her
family's sufferings in camp to some American students. 'What
did you do to deserve that?' someone asked. She answered that
she had nursed at her mother's breast. At the end of the war, her
sister was one year old, Dr Kent was five.

Dr Kent is only one part of the wave of new evidence now
entering the historical record which will probably change the
estimates of German deaths in the years 1945-50. Alfred de
Zayas has recently added to his pioneering work with his book
A Terrible Revenge; the American writer John Sack in his book
An Eye for an Eye has told an appalling story of Jewish
vengeance against Germans in Polish concentration camps; and
the German writer Hugo Rasmus's new book, Schattenjahre in
Potulitz tells in detail the story of one concentration camp run by

Poles. So far, most historians have assumed that about 2.1
million of the 16.6 million dispossessed Germans died during
expulsion, about 12 million arrived alive in shrunken Germany,
and the rest, some 2.5 million, somehow evaded expulsion to
survive. It now appears that if many of these evaded expulsion,
it was only by dying.

In every tragedy of this sort, there are many people who do
not lose their heads, but act from normal courtesy and kindness.
So there are moments of relief in these sad chronicles. The
priests who reported these incidents were quick to see the hand
of God, or of the church, but religious teaching had nothing to
do with the kindness that appeared constantly among the pagan
Bolsheviks. Many times one reads of a kind-hearted Russian
officer who winked at oppressive rules, or who allowed starving
refugees some food from his own stores, originally looted from
the Germans. Two Jewish girls from Breslau who had been
sheltered during the war by a German family in Maifritzdorf at
the risk of their lives, went straight to the Soviet commander
when he arrived in the village of Maifritzdorf, to tell their story.
They were believed and the kindness of the Germans became the
kindness of the Jews which then spread to the Russians. The
Soviet commander went so far as to give to Chaplain G. of the
village a document with the hammer and sickle seal which
protected the villagers from abuses which had formerly been
inflicted on them. 4J_

Among Protestants and Catholics whom I interviewed in France
because they had saved so many refugees during the war, I
encountered a strange resistance to my inquiries which
amounted to hostility. I could not understand this at first, and
then it was explained to me by a woman in Le Chambon-sur-
Lignon. I had been expressing admiration and praise for the
actions of these villagers who had saved thousands of refugees
at the risk of their lives. She made me see it had been nothing
like what I imagined. 'What we did was normal, 1 she said. 'It was
the Nazis who were extraordinary.' She was very matter-of-fact
about having risked her life for others. This was the banality of
good.

Many of the priests of the eastern regions, including a high
number of resisters against Nazism, were murdered by Poles
and Russians in the spring and summer of 1945. In Upper
Silesia, some forty- five priests were murdered because they
remained with their flocks to the bitter end. In Birkenau, four
priests shared the fate of earlier victims of the Nazis' nearby
concentration camp. 42

The great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, winner of the
Nobel prize, who has contributed enormously to the destruction
of the Soviet regime, wrote a rigorously honest poem about the
Red Army conquest of Prussia in 1945. He was soon arrested
and imprisoned for the anti-Soviet views he expressed. Solzhe-
nitsyn wrote in one stanza of the poem:

Zweiundzwanzig, Horingstrasse.

It's not been burned, just looted, rifled.

A moaning, by the walls half -muff led:

The mother's wounded, still alive.

The little daughter's on the mattress,

Dead. How many have been on it?

A platoon? A company perhaps?

A girl's been turned into a woman,

A woman turned into a corpse.

It ' s all come down to simple phrases :

Do not forget. Do not forgive!

Blood for blood. A tooth for a tooth!

The mother begs, 'Kill me, soldier!'

The italics are a quote from Russian propaganda inciting
the soldiers to vengeance. The first line refers to the ad-
dress of the house where the women lay. In the last lines of
the poem (not shown), Solzhenitsyn confesses that he too
took advantage of a captive woman.

CHAPTER 6
Death and Transfiguration

Various statistics published by the US Army, the US Military
Governor, the State Department, the German and French
governments, and by several writers such as Alfred de Zayas,
Konrad Adenauer, Heinz Guderian, Gustav Stolper and the
American authors of the booklet The Land of the Dead display a
very wide range of opinion about total deaths in Germany in
1946-50. In other European countries at the time, there is no
such variety of opinion on census statistics. Whatever caused
the strange variations in Germany in the years 1945- 50, the
Allies were all agreed on one notion: most of the dead had never
died. The proof that well over a million prisoners of war and
civilians were missing many years after 1945 elicited a simple
response: ask the other guys, not us. The prisoners were missing,
not dead.

To demystify these strange transfigurations of the dead and their
statistics, it is essential to remember that Germany for nearly all
of 1945- 50 was one great prison. Germans were not permitted to
emigrate until 1949 except for a handful of people valuable to
the Allies. Here is yet another example of how the Allied policies
were not intended only to prevent Germany from making war,
but also to wreak vengeance. Many Germans wanted to emigrate
right after the war but were refused. Emigration would certainly
have achieved the allied purpose of weakening Germany, but the
people were forced to remain behind in starvation conditions.
Mass immigration was controlled and enforced by the Allies. The
statistics were all under the control of the Allies. Everything of
consequence in the country was controlled by the Allies. When
assessing the validity of the figures now being issued by the
German government, one must remember that there was no inde-
pendent German government in those days. All of the figures for
1945- 50 were gathered under strict Allied control. Even the Ger-
man Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, when writing his memoirs of
the period, relied on Allied figures for the number of expellees. 1

There were three main locales for death for Germans after the
surrender. The first was in the POW camps, the second among
the expellees at home or on the road from their former homes to
occupied Germany, the third among residents of occupied Ger-
many. Of course, many Germans from the seized territories who
evaded expulsion died as well, but figures for them are not avai-
lable.

The lowest death rate for residents including expellees already
arrived (i.e. not including deaths en route) is offered by the
Military Governor of the US zone, who said that in the US
zone in 1947, the death rate of 12.1 per year per thousand
among civilians was only slightly higher than before the war. 2

The next lowest are the figures of the German government
(from the official agency Statistisches Bundesamt, Wiesbaden,
henceforth 'the German government 1 ) which show that some 2. 1
million expellees died between 1945 and 1950. They also report
death rates among residents based on Allied occupation army
reports. For 1947, the rate reported today by the German govern-
ment is 12.1 per thousand per year among the resident popula-
tion. 3

In the middle range are the several writers, among them Ade-
nauer, Heinz Guderian and Gustav Stolper, who say that 6 mil-
lion people died among the expellees alone. The expellees num-
bered around 14 to 15 million in total between 1945 and 1950.

The highest numbers are from the French government, which
implied that close to 7.5 million died among the expellees only.
We shall deal with the two extremes first, and end with a discus-
sion of the middle range figures.

The lowest estimates

The figures reported in the US Military Governor reports have
done a lot to detennine our view of the history of the period.
Widely disseminated, they have been widely accepted. They are
at the basis of the belief today throughout Germany and the
West generally, that in the west of Germany in 1945- 50 no very

large number of people died among either the expellees or among
the resident, non-expelled Germans of the three Western zones.

The US Military Governor, Lucius Clay, gave the death rate for
1947 in a report dated December 1947. It is 12.1 per thousand
per year. This death rate, says the governor, compares 'favorably'
with the pre-war rate of 1 1.9 per thousand per year. 4 If we take
this literally, it can only mean the governor favours a rise in the
death rate for Germany. If it is not to be taken literally, it would
have to be followed by 'in the circumstances', an easy enough
phrase to put in. This is a minor example of the sloppy and
evasive expression permeating the Military Governor reports on
the subject of the health and Allied treatment of the Germans.*
The accuracy of the death figure may be judged from the fact
that General Clay's own diplomatic advisor, Robert Murphy,
had reported independently to Washington just a few months
earlier that the death rate in Germany was so high that, in effect,
it must exceed the birth rate by two million people in the few
years during which the expellees and prisoners were to return.
The birth rate in 1947 in Germany was about 14%%. 5 And,
as we shall see below (p. 125), Clay's own US Army Medical
Officer was at that very moment reporting in secret a death rate
of over 21.5%% as at May 1946.

* There are so many examples of important omissions, evasions
and callous indifference in the reports that it is impossible to
believe they are all the result of sloppy writing.

A bigger flaw was in the reporting of the condition of prisoners
of war. The first Military Governor (Eisenhower) reported that
in August 1945 4,772,837 prisoners were on hand, or had been
transferred or discharged, without mentioning that the original
capture total was 5,224,310. The governor therefore was failing
to account for 451,473 people. Recent research has shown why:
these prisoners had died in camps commanded by the same
governor. 6

Governor Clay himself inadvertently revealed the deceptiveness
of his own figures when he wrote about the death rate in the
Soviet zone. Clay wrote of the Soviet zone in 1945 that, 'This
low food ration is already having its effect. The death rate in
many places has increased several-fold and infant mortality is
approaching 65% in many places. By the spring of 1946,
German observers expect that epidemics and malnutrition will
claim 2.5 to 3 million victims between the Oder and the Elbe. 1 7
Clay must have had stars and stripes in his eyes when he wrote
that, because he did not mention the death rate in the west
although he knew the food situation was just as bad in the
British and American zones. He himself had to reduce the ration
to l,275cpd, then it fell even further, to 1,000 for a while. A
group of German doctors reported in 1947 that the actual rations
issued for three months in the Ruhr section of the British zone
for average people amounted to only 800 calories per day. 8
Gustav Stolper reported that the ration in both British and
American zones for 'a long time in 1946 and 1947 dropped to
between 700 and 1,200 calories per day'. 9 The ration that
Clay said was predicted to kill so many millions of people in
the Soviet zone was 1,150 calories per day. But Clay makes no
reference to millions of corpses disfiguring the western land-
scape under his command. 10

The kind of reporting we have seen from Eisenhower and Clay
has led people to believe that the German death rate in 1947
was 12.1 per thousand per year, JJ_ lower than it was for two
years (12.2) in the prosperous 1960s. This notion is reported
without comment by the otherwise serious International
Historical Statistics, edited by B. R. Mitchell. Professor Mitchell
does not clearly cite his source, but he has said in correspon-
dence that 'it looks quite probable that [one] is right to disbelieve
the official death rate'. J_2 The Allied Control Council supervised
all the general statistics gathering, including the census in
Germany, through the Military Governments. The inheritor of
that information is the Statistisches Bundesamt, which today
may report 12.2 or 12.1. Which one it believes is hard to say. j_3
That the expert Mitchell could not clearly cite his sources for
Germany in 1945-50 is symptomatic o{ the difficulties met by
researchers attempting to determine vital statistics in Germany
when it was under Allied rule. So the conditions which in the

east sent the death rate soaring 'several-fold' according to Clay
are reported to have had absolutely no effect in the west. Perhaps
he did not notice - or care - because he was still in the grip of his
wartime animus against the Germans. Normally a correct if auto-
cratic man, Clay was still meting out harsh treatment to the star-
ving Germans in late November 1945, when he was asked to
permit two large shipments of Red Cross food destined for
German civilians to enter the country. Clay refused, with the
words 'Let the Germans suffer.' 14

The evidence is abundant in the Military Governors' reports
themselves that the governor was interested in giving the Chief
of Staff in Washington, the Secretary of State and the President a
pleasing portrait of Germany rather than a reliable statistic. It is
also clear that the President himself did not rely on these reports.
When the Displaced Persons camps were said in the American
press to be in bad shape in autumn 1945, Truman did not rely
on the Military Governor reports to find the facts, although the
governor was in charge of those camps and reported every
month. Truman appointed a commissioner to investigate. Simi-
larly, after many senators had angrily denounced American
policy in Germany, Truman paid no attention to the Military
Governor's monthly reports, with their enormous detail showing
that there was no problem. Instead, he asked Hoover to take over
and solve the problem. Hoover replied to Truman that he would
not go unless he had a mandate to investigate the very conditions
in Germany that the Military Governor reports were supposedly
describing. Truman let him have his way.

The highest estimates

The death figures of the French government are so high that they
verge on the unbelievable. j_5 They imply that some 50% of
the expellees died in a couple of years, far beyond the normal
death rate. Combined with the deaths of prisoners and the un-
reported deaths of non-expelled civilians, this would mean an
overall total of around fifteen million deaths. A cursory reading
of the documents about the expulsion shows, however, that this
50% figure does not differ much from the reports of thousands
of eye-witnesses who survived the expulsions. As we have seen,
in the hospital near Prague, twenty-six of twenty- seven children

in one transport died in a few weeks; in another case, the death
rate for some weeks was between 43 and 81% per year in one
large 'transport'.

In Silesia, some figures given mainly by priests have survived.
In Klein-Mahlendorf, according to the parish priest, 175 people
died in 1945, whereas normally around 110-115 people died
each year. And this happened although the village had already
lost about two-thirds of its people through the expulsions. The
main cause was the typhus that the Allies feared might spread to
their own troops in the west if they did not relieve the starvation
somewhat. The 1 945 Klein-Mahlendorf total death rate was
about 456% of the pre-war death rate. 16

Of eighteen landowners near Alt-Wette in Silesia who were
arrested and forced to work in the mines, twelve died in the first
six months, beginning in late 1945. 17 Among sixty-eight
villagers of Niederhermsdorf in one rail car, seven died in three
days and four nights, plus three more on arrival. This is a rate far
above 100% per year. 18

The people of Lossen suffered abominably under the Russians.
Of 770 who returned to the village after the Russian occupation
began, more than 100 died in the six months from June to
December 1945. This was a rate of around 26%, or 260 per
thousand per year, roughly 2 1 times the pre-war rate for the
area. 19

In the villages of Glogau and Kuttlau, the rate was between
100 and 155 per thousand per year for the last half of 1945. 20
At Thomaswaldau, the rate was around 42 per thousand in the
last six months of 1945. 21

These and the French figures must be viewed against figures
from Stolper, Guderian and, above all, Adenauer. These seem
promising to investigate because they are offered by experts who
were there in responsible positions at the time - Stolper with the
Hoover Commission, and Adenauer first as Mayor of Cologne,
then as Chancellor of West Germany. They reveal a massacre
not as huge as implied by the French, but far beyond the belief
of any later historian.

The mid-range figures

The mid-range figures from Adenauer and a few others say that
some six million expellees alone died, without specifying any
unusual number of deaths among the resident civilians. Aden-
auer wrote in March 1949:

According to American figures, a total of 13.3 million Ger-
mans were expelled from the eastern parts of Germany, from
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and so on. 7.3 million
arrived in the eastern zone and the three western zones . . .
6 million Germans have vanished from the earth. They are
dead, gone. Most of the 7.3 million who stayed alive are
women, children and old people.

A large part of the workers were shipped to the USSR for forced
labour. The expulsion of these 13 to 14 million brought with it
unending suffering. Atrocities were committed that are worthy
of being put beside those perpetrated by German National
Socialists [Nazis]. 1 22

All these reports come from staunch friends of the West —
Adenauer, Stolper, the French government, and others. We can
see they are not lies: are they perhaps incorrect?

One of the leading experts on post-war refugees, author of a
standard reference work, European Refugees, which is cited by
many subsequent authors, is the British writer Malcolm Proud-
foot. In Table 40 of his book, Proudfoot gives a detailed
survey of the statistics of the German expellees from 1945 to
1950, by which time the exodus had ended for nearly all of
them. We can get some idea of the validity of the Adenauer
figures by combining some of Proudfoot's basic figures with
others from the Allied Control Council, so we can compare the
apparent growth of the German population between January
1946 and September 1950 with the actual census count in 1950.

To Proudfoot's opening population of 60.4 million in January,
1946, we add the births and immigration in the period 1946- 50
to find the total possible population for 1950. Births numbered
some 5 million, the returning prisoners numbered 4.8 million,
and the expellees, according to Proudfoot, added some 8.3

million, making a total potential population before deaths and
emigration of 78.5 million. From these we subtract deaths
officially recorded of 3. 85 million and emigration of some 0.6
million. 23 The result is that in September 1950 we should find
74.05 million people. But the census of September 1950 found
only 68.8 million. Missing, not accounted for, were 5.25 million
people. These are in addition to the officially recorded deaths
inside occupied Germany. These are in addition to the six
million expellees Adenauer thought had died before reaching
Germany. What happened to all these people?

Can the statistics be wrong? As we shall see below, the Allied
Control Council figures from the census are the most reliable we
have on this subject. If these are wrong, then virtually nothing is
known for certain on the topic.

Can the expert Proudfoot have misunderstood? There is some
slight evidence for that. For instance, he admits that he was
working only from estimates' in a large number of categories,
without specifying which categories. Also, he did not refer to
the census of Germany that was conducted under the Allies in
October 1946, ten months after the start-date of his own
population tables, although he did end his table with the census
conducted in September 1950. Further, Proudfoot reports that
the total of refugees in the British zone in January 1947 was
3,201,000, whereas the British themselves reported to the Control
Council that just over 3,500,000 had arrived at that date, of
whom only 2,800,000 actually remained in their zone, the others
having departed for other zones. 24 Clearly, Proudfoot did the
best he could with the figures that were available at the time,
which have been superseded by papers since declassified.

We have today something Proudfoot did not use in his basic
table, the census figures for October 1946, done by the four
military governments of Germany who controlled the censusses
of 1946 and 1950.

The October 1946 census of all four zones of occupied Germany
was carried out 'by Germans under the direction of the Allied
Control Council'. 25 The second census, of August-September
1950, was also carried out by Germans under the control of the

four occupying powers. An important subset is the births
recorded in the relevant period. Statistics concerning the
expellees have always been disputed, but we do now know, as
a result of the declassification of the Murphy Papers from 1988
on, the number of expellees who arrived in occupied Germany
during the period between censusses. There were six million. 26
The number of prisoners discharged into Germany during the
period is also known: 2,600,000. 27 This number has been
seriously disputed, but the truth has been discovered in the KGB
archives in Moscow, recently opened. The numbers of deaths
and emigrants are also known. 28 With these figures in place,
we can swiftly calculate the missing/unreported deaths.

The population of all occupied Germany in October 1946 was
65,000,000, according to the census prepared under the ACC. 29
The returning prisoners who were added to the population in the
period October 1946-September 1950 numbered 2,600,000
(rounded), according to records in the archives of the four
principal Allies. Births according to the official German statistical
agency, Statistisches Bundesamt, added another 4,176,430
newcomers to Germany. 30 The expellees arriving totalled
6,000,000. Thus the total population in 1950 before losses would
have been 77,776,430, according to the Allies themselves.
Deaths officially recorded in the period 1946-50 were 3,235,539,
according to the UN Yearbook and the German government. 31
Emigration was about 600,000, according to the German
government. 32 Thus the population found should have been
73,940,891. But the census of 1950 done by the German
government under Allied supervision found only 68,230,796. 33
There was a shortage of 5,710,095 people, according to the
official Allied figures (rounded to 5,700,000). (These results
differ from those based on the Proudfoot figures largely because
the time period is different.)

Such a gigantic discrepancy immediately raises questions. The
first is, how reliable are the largest figures, the censusses?

The Allies took great care over these figures because the German
population was extremely important to all of them. They even
recorded the 1,143 people registered as ship crews at sea. All the
Allies believed that they were in serious danger of further German

aggression, which they judged was prompted (as Hitler himself
had said), by too great a population confined to too little land.
Therefore, the Allies' discussions centred on population
comparisons of post-war Germany with Germany in 1939; of
Germany with France; on the German birth rate; on population
per square kilometre; on agricultural production per person and
per kilometre; and so on. Important Allied policy decisions about
Germany in this period were based on these censusses. The
Allies disagreed about all kinds of substantive issues and policy
in the period, but they agreed on the German birth rates and the
base populations assessed in 1946 and 1950.

Of the remaining variables, we know that the arriving expellees
were counted at the border and reported year by year by the
Allied Control Council, whose figures we now have. 34 'The
statistical picture of newcomer-population in the western zones
is elaborate and complete,' according to a memo of 18 May
1949 by Brad Patterson, secretary to Robert Murphy, in the
preparatory papers to the 1949 Council of Foreign Ministers
used by US Ambassador Robert Murphy. Nevertheless there
were some slight variations in the figures.

Up to 1995, the prisoner-of-war arrivals were in dispute because
the Western Allies said that the Soviets had over 3,000,000
prisoners, when in fact they had only around 890,000. With the
opening of the KGB archives, we now know that the Soviet
figures are the most solid evidence available in all the prisoner
archives. This is a massive correction only possible because of
the end of Cold War. All the other figures necessary to calculate
the prisoners on hand at October 1946 were supplied by the
governments in question.

Of all the remaining variables, the only one seriously at issue
is the death figure. Could 5.7 million extra deaths have occurred
beyond those recorded in German and Allied documents? Either
the official death figures are wrong, or the censusses with their
subsidiary figures. The question has now become: are those
official, published, Allied/West German death statistics reliable?

To begin with, the official West German government death
figures are at odds with themselves. As we saw, they reported

that the death rate during two prosperous years of 1968-69 was
12.2 per thousand per year. This is higher than the death rate of
12.1 they report for 1947, a year of unparalleled misery, starva-
tion, want and epidemic disease, remembered by Germans as the
Hunger Year (Hungerjahr). That is incredible. I believe that the
explanation for this is simple: the source for the official German
figure for 1947 was not German at all, it was the US Military
Governor, who reported the 12.1 figure to President Truman.
Dr de Zayas, author of the definitive work on the expellees,
has several times since January 1994 asked the Statistisches
Bundesamt at Wiesbaden to explain the discrepancies and to
reveal their sources for statistics in 1945-50, and has received
no satisfaction. This also happened to a Member of the Bundes-
tag, a friend of De Zayas, who asked for similar information,
and received no explanation of the strange discrepancies. As
we have seen, the expert Professor Brian Mitchell has cast
doubt on the reliability of the official figures.

The West German government death figures being reported to
this day are also at odds with nearly all the other sources that we
have, both German and Allied. Let us look at a mid-sized city,
Brilon, which had always been prosperous, and in 1945 regarded
itself as one of the more fortunate of the German towns. In the
first place, it was in the British-Canadian zone, where the policy
was, if not exactly genial, at least not fatally indifferent as it was
in the French and Soviet zones. And Brilon was also favoured
by its location, in beautiful rolling country north-west of Kassel
near a formerly prosperous agricultural region not as heavily
damaged as most others. This was especially lucky for the
71,000 people of Brilon, because it meant that they could
scrounge for food more easily in a productive countryside close
by.

According to a report gathered from the town council of Brilon
by the Canadian army in 1946, the death rate in the town was
34 per thousand per year for the eleven months between 1st
May 1945 and 31 March 1946. The same report shows that the
death rate was triple the birth rate (2,224 versus 687). 35 A similar
situation existed in the village of Mark-toberdorf, near Augsburg,
in the US zone, where the death rate in 1946 was 27%%. It was
24%% in 1947, then fell in 1948 to 17%%. But then it rose again,

to 24%% in 1949 and 27%% in 1950. The long-term effects of
famine may be evident here. 36

General Mark Clark, US Military Commissioner in the US zone
of Austria, reported in April 1946 that the death rate in Vienna
was varying between 27 and 35 per thousand per year. His
report stated that, 'This relatively high death rate prevailed
during a period when the ration scale was l,550cpd. With a drop
in the ration it is probable that these rates will increase. 1 37 And
in fact, those rations for Germans did drop by about a third, or
more. 'During the first months of 1947, supplies of food for the
Combined [US and UK] zone fell again to the low level of the
two preceding winters.' Daily rations were often less than 1,000
calories. 38 In Schleswig-Holstein, in the British zone, the daily
ration for seven months in mid- 1 947 was only 1 ,240 calories
per day. 39

All this had the effect that Clark predicted. We know from the
Medical Officer of Health of the US Army that the death rate in
the US zone in Germany in May 1946 was 21.5 per thousand per
year, and that it had previously been higher. 40 Hoover reported
to the President that there had been an appalling increase of 40%
in deaths of aged people in only three months. 41 This is a
significant report, since aged people not only constitute a far
greater share of the dying than any other sector of the population,
they were also a much higher proportion than normal among the
population in Germany at that date. On the basis of the report
from Clark, and because we know that the rations in the US and
British zones did often drop to around l,000cpd, it is not unrea-
sonable to assume that the higher rate in the Combined (British-
American) zone was at least as high as the Vienna rate of 27/35
per thousand per year.

It is impossible to reconcile the official Military Governor and
West German figures of low deaths with the figures from the city
of Brilon, the Medical Officer of the US Army, ETO, and the
census results. Because the Military Governor figures are con-
tradicted by the detailed documentation found in Ottawa and
Stanford, and because the Military Governor and official Ger-
man figures are self-contradictory and self serving, and because
Robert Murphy predicted a huge loss of life in Germany, and

because the Proudfoot comparisons show a huge number
of Missing/Not Accounted For, and because the Allied cen-
susses show 5.7 million Missing/Not Accounted For, and
because members of the Hoover Famine Emergency Commis-
sion found 'much lying' going on among the officers of the
US military government, and because members of the ACC
said that the Morgenthau Plan was being implemented, and
because the low official death figures do not accord with the
reality reported and deplored in the United States Senate, and
because the German government statistical agency has been
unable to define its sources, it is reasonable to conclude that
the low death figures are not reliable.

In contrast, the figures based on comparison of the censusses,
and the figures below from Robert Murphy, are all coherent in
themselves, and relate convincingly to each other. They also
describe in statistical terms the huge die-off that is reported
throughout Germany in anecdotal terms.

As Clay's top diplomatic adviser, Robert Murphy was perhaps
the most important American participant in decisions on Ger-
many in this period. But his personal papers at Stanford were
classified until 1988, and papers to which he contributed, rela-
tive to the Council of Foreign Ministers' conferences in 1947
and 1949, were classified at the State Department in Washington
until 1989 - a few more were declassified as late as 1991. These
papers together give a high-level and deeply informed view over
the whole of the period in Germany. They are especially revea-
ling on the subject of the German population.

Murphy understood both from the census and from direct perso-
nal experience what was being done to the people of Germany.
He wrote in his Council of Foreign Ministers' preparatory papers,
February 1947, that he expected the German population overall
to shrink by two million during the period of the return of the
prisoners, roughly the next two to three years. This overall shrin-
kage would exist after allowing for the net of births, deaths, emi-
gration and immigration including return of prisoners. He wrote
that this tremendous loss of life would occur because of the 'pre-
sent high death rate in Germany'. 42

Murphy said that after the influx, which he expected to number
two million prisoners and four million expellees, the population
would rise by only four million. This was only possible if deaths
exceeded births by two million in the period, since emigration
was not permitted at the time. The period was three years, so
Murphy was saying that deaths would exceed births by two
million in 1947-50. We know the birth rate for 1946. It was
14%%. Therefore Murphy was basing his prediction on a death
rate he knew to be 24%%. 43

The importance of Murphy's prediction can hardly be exagge-
rated. It shows that he was basing official American policy on
the expectation that this phenomenal death rate, already pre-
vailing nationwide, would continue for three more years. He
believed it so firmly that he put it on record to the State
Department, to the British, French, Soviet and other American
officials in Germany. And he based this on the same statistics
that determined all Allied policy decisions for all four powers
towards Germany. In other words, by implication, all of the
Allied powers believed as Murphy did, that the death rate in
Germany was 24%% or higher, and would continue for years
at that rate.

The comparison of the censusses has shown us already that
some 5.7 million people disappeared inside Germany between
October 1946 and September 1950, in addition to those
officially reported, and in addition to the millions of expellee
deaths and millions of prisoner deaths. But the census of 1950
also shows that Murphy in 1947 was low in estimating future
deaths. He had estimated a population for Germany of
69,000,000 once the expellees had arrived and the surviving
prisoners were back. The 1950 census showed there were
actually only 68,400,000 present, and that many more
expellees and prisoners had returned than he predicted. Murphy
had predicted that the net 'immigration' would be 6 million,
made up of returning prisoners and expellees arriving. In fact,
the number who had arrived between October 1946 and Sep-
tember 1950 was 8.6 million, made up of 6 million expellees
and 2.6 million prisoners. Murphy's death prediction was low
because the death rate he was using as at October 1946 was
too low. The rate rose during the disastrous Hunger Year, 1947.

The West German government has not accounted for those
five to six million people missing in Germany, but it has said
that 2.1 million expellees died en route to occupied Germany
from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union. 44 These
deaths, having occurred outside Germany, were not included in
the official death figures for Germany as published today, and
are therefore irrelevant to the death totals within occupied
Germany.

Little is known about the fate of the Germans who remained
behind in the seized territories. The expellees say over and over
in their accounts that, 'Our village was empty ... all of the vil-
lages were abandoned . . .' and so on. Since it was the policy of
the Poles and Russians, agreed by the Western democracies, to
empty the land of all Germans, and the anecdotal evidence says
over and over again that this happened, it is easy to believe that
the policy was carried out. It is therefore hard to believe that
people stayed behind, unless they were already dying. But the
West German government figure of 2.1 million dead and about
12.5 million arrivals means that one must believe that some
2,645,000 persons went on living in these 'empty villages'. Can
this be believed? The Poles said that in early 1947 there were
only 400,000 Germans left in the land where there had been
about 8 million people. The stay-at-homes thus were around
5% of the original population. 45 In Czechoslovakia there were
around 250,000 who remained behind in 1950, approximately
8% of the German population in May 1945. 46 It appears more
credible that most of the missing died, and their deaths were
hidden. The evidence above speaks for itself to the reader. In
the statistical tables of deaths that follow, the official figures for
expellee deaths and stay-behinds are used but not endorsed by
the author.

* * *

Summary

In sum, there is compelling evidence from the census and from
Ambassador Murphy that between October 1946 and September
1950 in the four occupied zones, some 5.7 million German
civilian residents of Germany died but were not reported to have
died. Although most of these people died from lack of food,
their deaths were not caused by the world food shortage described
by some historians. They were dying seventeen months to five
years after the German surrender. They began dying when world
food production was 97% of normal. They were for a considerable
time prevented from receiving charitable help, and from earning
their own bread. They went on dying while world food production
climbed ever higher. The great majority of the dead Germans were
women, children and very old men. 47

TOTALS OF DEATHS

Minimum Maximum

Expellees (1945-50) 2,100,000 6,000,000

Prisoners (1941-50) 1,500,000 2,000,000

Residents (1946-50) 5,700,000 5,700,000

Totals 9,300,000 1 3,700,000

note :

The prisoners' minimum deaths is an unrealistically
cautious estimate based on the notion that somehow, no one
died who had not been counted missing by Dr Bitter and
subsequent surveyors. Those counted as missing numbered
1.4 million military, to whom ate here added 66,000 dead
paramilitary in the USSR.

The deaths above (in the table) are not only above and
beyond those actually reported, but also most of the victims
died after October 1946. Of course there were many deaths
in the period from August 1945, when the Potsdam policies

took full effect, up to the time of the first census in
October 1946.

Between the imposition of the Potsdam Agreements in
August 1945, and the first census, Octobet 1946, probably
about 1,950,000 German non-expelled civilians died, but
only about 1,100,000 deaths were reported. 50 This means
that about 800,000 more Germans died and were not
reported by he Allies between August 1 945 and October
1946.

It is not possible from the figures available to determine
how many civilians died in the Soviet zone and how many
in the Western zones.

The Adenauer government also determined by survey that at least
1.4 million Germans did not come home from Allied POW camps.
They all died. 48

A further 2.1 million people, nearly all women and children, are
admitted by the West Germans and the Allies to have died during
the expulsions. Notable authorities, including the first Chancellor
of West Germany, have written that at least six million among the
expellees alone died.

At least 9.3 million Germans died needlessly soon after the war,
the great majority because of the conditions imposed by the four
major victors. This is many more Germans than died in battle, air
raids and concentration camps during the war. 49 Millions of
these people slowly starved to death in front of the victors' eyes
every day for years. These deaths have never been honestly
reported by either the Allies or the German government.

Why did this happen? The answer begins with understanding
that most of the deaths were not accidental. A man who studied
the cause of these deaths, who knew the famine intimately, and
who worked magic to avert the catastrophe, has written of the
famine in Germany in 1947: '[Our] occupation has no chance of
success if these [famine] conditions continue. This state of affairs
has been foreseen, and I have urged repeatedly that priority be
recognized for food shipments to Germany. The basis for the
priority is the prevention of famine in the US-UK zones of
Germany . . .' 51 The man who believed that 'this state of affairs

has been foreseen 1 was the US Secretary of War, Robert Patterson.
The man he was trying to move to action was the US Secretary
of State, George C. Marshall.

The rest of the answer to 'Why? 1 is to find out why so many
people tried to cover this up. After all, if the Allies did their best
to feed the starving civilians, and all the fault lay with the Nazis,
or the world food shortage, why cover up the resulting deaths?
Why not advertise them as the grim consequence of evil and
error? The gallows at Nuremberg, the prosecutions of concen-
tration-camp guards for fifty years, are public evidence of an
apparently clear conscience in the West on Nazi crimes. Why
hide these millions of civilian deaths, since historical theory, if it
pays any attention at all, attributes them to consequences of Nazi
policies? The cover-up alone shows that the Allies have to this
day a very uneasy conscience on the subject.

Clearly the military camouflaged all this as best they could
because they knew their reputations would be damaged if the
truth came out. Love of reputation is a minor guarantor of good
behaviour but a great source of hypocrisy in any society. The
cover-up illustrates another feature: that the perpetrators of the
crimes were in profound conflict with people in the West who
saw a much better solution than vengeance - like Hoover,
Gollancz, Senators Langer and Wherry, along with Dorothy
Thompson, thousands of nameless aid workers and a very few
honest reporters. Theirs was the conflict between crime and
mercy - or good and evil if you will.

Many people representing the West in Germany were deeply
distressed at what they saw. People such as Murphy and Behnke
reveal in their uneasy words their uneasy conscience. Many such
people were quite prepared to hang a Nazi, but it was repugnant
to them to starve his child to death without a trial. They were
disgusted by Allied co-operation in forcing the expellees out of
the east. It might be thought that the Nazis' aggressions and
crimes against civilians were the unique cause of this terrible
vengeance, but nothing like this was visited on Japan. The
Japanese had been waging a war of conquest, enslavement and
near-extermination against civilian Chinese and Koreans for far
longer, but General Douglas MacArthur, when he was Military

Governor of Japan, demanded enough food from Washington to
keep civilians alive. 'Give me bread or give me bullets,' he told
Washington, and they gave him bread.

At heart the Westerners appear to have reacted in 1945 against
the Germans much as they had in 1918, except that their fury
was magnified by the desire to have done with the German
problem once and for all. This anger went on so long, cut so
deep, that it endangered the whole continent, while it exposed
the West to ever-increasing danger from the Soviets. While the
Soviets pillaged, menaced and murdered in Eastern Europe,
while they stole Canada's atomic secrets, subverted democratic
governments and spread hatred of the West round the world, the
Western democracies fed, protected and befriended them. But the
democracies would scarcely recognize those in Germany who
had proven at the risk of their lives that they too were enemies
of Hitler.

Those few people in the West today who do admit to allied
crimes excuse them on the ground of the ferocious hatred roused
by the race crimes of Hitler. But the truth is, the Western nations
had already inflicted a similar vengeance on the Germans when
there was no question of Nazi racism. What happened before
happened again.

The pattern began long before 1914. For centuries, various
powers in Europe had attempted to dominate or destroy the
Germans. One of the classic passages of German history, by
Heinrich von Treitschke, describes the result of the Thirty Years'
War of 1618- 48. Then at length the last and decisive war of the
epoch . . . broke out. All the powers of Europe took part in the
war ... In a disturbance without parallel, the old Germany passed
away. Those who had once aimed at world domination were now
by the pitiless justice of history, placed under the feet of the
stranger. The Rhine and the Ems, the Oder and the Vistula, all
the ways to the sea became captive of the foreign nations . . . The
entire life of Germany lay open without defence to the superior
civilization of the foreigner . . . Never was any other nation so
forcibly estranged from itself and from its own past . . .' 52 These
words might have been written about the Germany of 1945,
which was also captive of the foreign nations, after Hitler's

attempt at world domination was ended by the last and deci-
sive war of our epoch.

The similarities between the events immediately following the
First and Second World Wars, are uncanny. After the First
World War, Allied promises of just treatment for all peoples
after the war were immediately broken; food lay rotting on the
docks in European ports while Germans starved to death; 53
German soldiers were accused of great atrocities such as
bayonetting babies, of burning libraries, massacring civilians; a
pogrom against Jews was reported, and vast reparations were
imposed on the Germans while the economy of the nation
collapsed, millions of people starved and communist Russia
threatened the whole of Europe. All this happened after 1918,
and it happened again, only far worse, after 1945.

There was thus in 1945 among the Allies another motive to
secrecy. It was important to hide the punishment because it had
already been demonstrated that the earlier punishment had not
been a deterrent. In fact, the only lesson of the Treaty of Ver-
sailles was that it had helped Hitler to goad the Germans to re-
arm in the 1930s.

Two characteristics distinguished the victors of 1945 from nearly
all others in modern European history. One is that they refused
to allow the vanquished any treaty at surrender. Everything was
imposed. The other was that they did not end the killing at the
end of the war, but increased it. Above all, what was expected
of the Allies, even by their own people, was to end the killing.
But in fact, far more civilian Germans died in five years of
'peace' than soldiers in six years of war. 54

As we have seen, at the Nuremberg trials of the German war
criminals, the Soviets saw an opportunity to pin the blame for
the Katyn massacre on German scapegoats, to hang them and
have done with it. But their case was so patently bogus that the
Western Allies objected. All the Allied lawyers and judges knew
perfectly well that the Germans were not guilty, but not one of
them told the truth: that the only other nation that could have
committed the crime was the USSR.

One of the chief objections the Allies had to Nazi policies from
the beginning was that, in true totalitarian fashion, the Nazis
had persecuted many innocent Germans, beginning with their
political opponents, especially communists and Jews, liberal
academics, priests, pastors, homosexuals, gypsies, the mentally
retarded, and so on. More than three million Germans had been
in Nazi prisons at one time or another between 1933 and 1945.
Of these, some 800,000 were imprisoned for active resistance to
the Nazis. 55 Many others had fled the country. These Germans
were the only significant internal indigenous resistance move-
ment in the whole world during the war. Many Soviet citizens
resisted the Stalinists, but not at the highest levels, and not until
the Germans had taken over their areas. Only in Germany were
there any attempts on the life of the leader; only German senior
officers secretly delivered important intelligence to the enemy
during wartime; only in Germany did senior officers such as
admirals and generals risk their lives and their families to bring
down the regime. The second-in-command of the Nazi party,
Rudolf Hess, defected to the British in an attempt to bring the
war to an end in 1941. The British made no attempt to use him
to bring down Hitler. They judged him mad and imprisoned
him for the rest of his life. The most famous general of the war,
Erwin Rommel, was ordered by Hitler to choose between exe-
cution and suicide for his part in the resistance. The head of
German military intelligence, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, 'took
breathtaking risks to advance the cause of resistance to Hitler'.
56 by passing secret information to the Allies. He was hanged
by Hitler in April 1945.

Allen Dulles, the head of the American intelligence effort in
Switzerland, who ran the only important American spy ring
inside Germany, complained strongly about Allied policy in
1943. 'I do not understand what our policy is, 1 he cabled to
Washington, 'and what offers, if any, we could make to the
resistance movement.' In March 1943, he told Washington that
the Allied policy of unconditional surrender would mean a
catastrophe 'for the country and for the individual German.
We ourselves have done nothing to offer them a more hopeful
meaning for this expression: we have never, for example,
indicated that it refers only to military and party leaders.' The
reason was clearly expressed by Roosevelt himself during a

meeting with his Joint Chiefs of Staff, when he said, '. . . the
German philosophy can not be changed by decree, law, or
military order ... I am not willing at this time to say that we
do not intend to destroy the German nation. 1 57

Churchmen such as Joseph Cardinal Frings of Cologne, Pastor
Niemoller, 58 Bishop von Galen, aristocrats, leaders and officers
such as Fabian von Schlabrendorf, were pushed aside, or ignored
or treated with contumely by the victorious Allies. The widow of
one officer, Col. Georg Hansen, who had been executed by
Hitler for resistance, lived in grief and poverty after the war
because she was refused a pension and her husband's bank
account was for a long time blocked by the Allies. Some, such
as Ernst von Weizsacker, were jailed by the Allies despite much
evidence that they had risked a great deal to prevent war. Von
Weizsacker was found guilty and sentenced to five years. After
strong British pleas to President Truman, he was finally released,
when his sentence was reduced to time already served. He died
less than a year later, on 4 August 1951. As the English author
Patricia Meehan has shrewdly concluded, 'It was not the impri-
sonment for years of an innocent man which the [British]
Foreign Office deprecated, so much as the incompetence of the
American judges. The "Von Weizsacker Trial" file listed in the
Foreign Office index is not, alas, to be found. No doubt it still
exists somewhere in the weeders' limbo." 59

While the German resistance movement was being treated with
contempt by the British and Americans, the Soviets were
making considerable efforts to indoctrinate captured Germans
with communist ideology. As we saw, they set up a special camp
at Krasnogorsk near Moscow where they re-educated willing
German prisoners, including the famous Field Marshal, Paulus,
who had besieged Stalingrad. The democracies made great
efforts to aid every other resistance movement in Europe, none
of them able to make a material difference in the fighting, while
they refused all help to Hitler's German enemies, who were the
only ones with a chance to end the war immediately. After the
attempt on Hitler's life in July 1944, which ended in mass exe-
cutions of resistance leaders by the Gestapo, all Churchill could
think to tell the House was that 'the highest personalities in the
German Reich are murdering one another, or trying to, while

the avenging armies of the Allies close upon the doomed and
ever-narrowing circle of their power 1 . 60

Sir John W. Wheeler-Bennett, a senior Foreign Office advisor,
thought that, 'It is to our advantage therefore that the [Hitler]
purge should continue, since the killing of Germans by Germans
will save us from future embarrassments of many kinds. 1 61

There was of course a reason for this unreasonable behaviour:
the Allies were intent on unconditional surrender, which meant
that they would not have to make any deals at all with any
Germans, and could then treat the country as they wished.
According to this view, all the Germans were so treacherous that
no one could trust any of them. It was not just Nazis who were
bad, it was all Germans. Any who tried to make peace were
simply evil men who had seen the writing on the wall. No one
could trust a German who was simply trying to get himself or his
country out of a losing war by sacrificing Hitler. There was never
any movement on the Western side to a rapprochement with any
Germans, no matter how opposed they were to Hitler, no matter
what they risked in defiance of Nazism, no matter how much
they believed in the same ideals as the Allies themselves.

One of the oddities in Western policy was to continue support
of Stalin in the USSR and Eastern Europe, while shunning like
the plague all Stalinist communists in Germany, who had been
by far the strongest of the resistors against the Nazis. Some
communist prisoners at the concentration camp at Buchenwald
very nearly captured the camp administration; communist and
socialist resistors crowded the jails of Germany from 1933 to
1945. Their resistance was on a vastly greater scale than all
others. But the Western powers feared them, while they were
quite willing to hire ex-Nazis if they seemed useful. 62 These
were a few scientists, spies and the like, who were spirited away
regardless of their political affiliations. Some of these were taken
to the US in 1945- 47, then taken by train to the Canadian border
at Niagara Falls, where the Canadians allowed them to enter the
country illegally, then re-enter the US to comply with American
immigration regulations. Some, perhaps many of these people,
had been members of the Nazi party. One such was Dr Herbert
P. Raabe of Potomac, Maryland, a radar expert who was illegally

brought to the US, then laundered' along with many others at
Niagara Falls, Canada, before being returned to the US as a
legal 1 immigrant. 63 At the same time, large categories of resis-
ting Germans, easy for the Allies to identify because many
were in Hitler's jails in 1945, were starved along with the rest.
These included Jehovah's Witnesses, who had fiercely resisted
Hitler, refusing to fight or salute Nazi symbols, and so on.

The German-born Mennonites also resisted, although many
caved in to Nazi pressure to join the armed forces. Some stuck
to their pacifist principles, and ended up in jail, or else working
in hospitals. But when in 1945 the Mennonite Central Com-
mittee in Canada and the US tried to send food over to their
co-religionists, the Allied military governments refused the
necessary permits. For over a year, thousands of men and
women, many of whom had bravely (or not so bravely) resisted
Hitler, starved while their co-religionists were prevented from
helping them. Only in June 1946 were the Mennonites, Quakers
and others finally permitted to send the necessary food to
Germany. 64 Among the millions of Soviet citizens returned to
the USSR were hundreds of thousands of refugees from com-
munist tyranny. These included thousands of Mennonites who
were beaten and shot at by British troops trying to force them on
to the trains to the Gulag, for example at Liezen in Austria in
June 1945.

Thus the democracies went on fighting the Germans long after
the war ended, while their leaders promoted the Soviets, lied for
them, and aided them in many ways. It has long been assumed
that the West was simply too weak to resist the Soviet takeover
of Poland and other Eastern European countries, but in fact the
West was not helpless in the face of Russian might. At Potsdam,
they were not under any threat from the Soviets when they
approved the illegal transfers of populations and the seizure of
German lands, all actions which were completely against the
Atlantic Charter and various UN declarations. The US and
Canada went on sending food, machinery and other aid to the
Soviets long after their brutal actions in the East were known to
Allied leaders.

Herbert Hoover was astonished to find how little UNRRA was
doing to feed civilians in 'the seat of Western civilization 1 , west
of the Iron Curtain. Only 20% of the world's famine area was
being served, and most of UNRRA's food and other aid went
to support the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union itself. 65 The West not only helped them to cover
up the war crimes they had committed against Poles at Katyn,
the British showed that they apparently approved of Soviet
crimes, when they delivered many thousands more victims from
their cages into the hands of the same KGB murderers.

Winston Churchill bullied and persuaded the Free Poles who
had been his allies in London during the war to return to Poland,
assuring them that they would be taken into the new government.
In fact, they were immediately arrested by Stalin and never seen
free again. It is a fact that the British helped the Soviets to butcher
or imprison the Cossacks and White Russians, while they and the
Americans were indiscriminately punishing the Christian
democratic resisters within Germany.

It has never been explained in the West how it was that their
governments could reinforce the regime of mass-murderers like
Stalin, Beria, Kaganovich and Molotov, while they were so
afraid of truthful, compassionate men like Dietrich Bonhoffer,
Cardinal Frings, Helmut von Moltke, Claus von Stauffenberg
and hundreds of thousands of other German resisters. Many
Western leaders viewed with indifference or approval the
starvation of Germans who included friends of democracy and
freedom. For instance, when Pastor Martin Niemoller said that
he wanted to make a tour of Switzerland and the US in 1946 to
'appeal to fellow Christians and men of good will', he was
arrested and returned to a concentration camp. 66 The Westerners
had condemned the Nazis for assigning collective guilt to groups
for crimes of individual members, but it would be unrealistic to
deny that they did the same thing themselves.

All this is scarcely known to the major participants. A whole
nation was maimed in peacetime, but when the events are even
mentioned by the German survivors, they are immediately
hushed up by their own government. No one is allowed to dig
for the corpses of the murdered prisoners in Germany. 67 The

criminals go free. To defend them, lies are told by historians
who also defame the injured. Free expression of historical
opinion is curbed by legislation that grows ever more stringent
as time passes. No denial of history has ever been so successful.

Never was any other nation so forcibly estranged from itself
and from its own past.

Which goes for the democracies too.

* * *

CHAPTER 7

The Victory of the Merciful

'Erst kommt das Fressen,
dann kommt die Moral. '

[First the grub, then the preaching]

BERTOLT BRECHT, THE THREEPENNY OPERA

We now turn our eyes away from criminals to men of the same
nations but not of the same kind. These were the saviours, who
came in the wake of war to help others.

There were two extraordinary events in the summer of 1945,
apart from the atomic explosions. The first was the imposition of
Allied vengeance on all Germans regardless of guilt, and the
second was the organization of the greatest act of compassion
the world had ever known. All around the world in 1945 there
were areas of food poverty, as there have always been and are
now. But in 1945, for the first time in human history, there was a
concerted attempt by some nations to deal with food poverty
around the world. This had never happened before. This was the
real news, not the eternal pockets of food poverty. The nations
leading this effort were the United States and Canada, helped by
Australia and Argentina.

The relief of hunger around the world lay in the hands of a
few men in Ottawa and Washington during the spring of 1945.
These were the Prime Minister of Canada, Mackenzie King; one
of his chief advisers, Norman Robertson, under- secretary in the
Department of External Affairs; the new American President
Harry Truman; and a man with no office, Herbert Hoover.

In the spring of 1945, Herbert Hoover stood aloof from the
many people in Washington who were imposing starvation on
Germany. This was why Truman needed him. He was never
vindictive. Hoover appealed to a huge constituency of decent,
moderate Americans who could not be satisfied by anyone less.
Any world relief effort under his command would be effective
and credible. Anyone else would begin with a handicap: not
being Hoover. In 1945, as before, Hoover was the conscience
of the West.

Harry Truman shared Herbert Hoover's generous impulse to
feed the starving, whether they were ex-enemy or not. In May
1945, both were caught in the conflicting forces of politics in
Washington. Truman needed Hoover's wisdom and experience
because starvation threatened both ally and enemy in Europe, but
it was difficult for Truman the Democrat to call on Hoover, who
was not only a famous Republican but also a political has-been.
Roosevelt had cast him into the outer darkness, a policy that
remained in force under Steve Early, the press secretary inherited
by Truman from Roosevelt. Steve Early and Roosevelt were so
opposed to Hoover's efforts to bring relief to starving Belgians
and Poles that Early had once given orders over his White House
phone to Norman Davis, Chairman of the American Red Cross,
to 'Stop that fellow Hoover. We don't want him to get anywhere.' 1

Hoover was by far the most knowledgeable person in the world
on international food relief, but he had been kept entirely out of
the allied planning for post-war aid. The planning had been
initiated by the British in September 1941, then gradually
expanded to include the Americans, Soviets, Canadians and
Chinese. It was the Chinese delegate to the Inter- Allied
Committee meeting in Washington in December 1942 who
asked that Hoover be called in to advise on some difficult
voting procedures, but the Roosevelt administration was so
prejudiced against Hoover that it refused. 2

The State Department also opposed Hoover. This combination
made it so difficult for Truman that the preliminary negotiations
in spring 1945 to get Hoover's help, through Secretary of War
Henry L. Stimson and others, went on for weeks, while both the
principals fretted. Truman wanted Hoover to offer his services

publicly, so he would not have the onus of inviting him; Hoover
needed the President's public invitation in order to be effective
once he did accept. This would demonstrate to the recalcitrant
Democrats and others that he was not seeking office, but had
responded to his country's needs. So many advisers became
involved that Truman finally escaped by a simple method: he
wrote by hand a letter to Hoover which he posted himself, in-
viting Hoover to come. The ice was broken. Hoover accepted
eagerly and finally went to Washington for a meeting in the
White House with Truman in May.

Truman asked Hoover for advice on several subjects, but
especially food relief for foreigners, excluding Germans. At
that time, the occupied countries were exclusively the province
of the occupying armies. All of the relief discussions among the
Western Allies had had a meagre result - the United Nations
Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Hoover had
a derisive opinion of it, because it was dominated by power
politics and lacking in authority. He told Truman that it was
'incapable of administering the larger economic problems of
Europe'. 3 Part of the trouble was that the organization was more
interested in itself than in its mission. Truman was probably
shocked to hear from this expert that UNRRA was grossly
inefficient. By the end of its life in Europe in 1947, it had
administered the supply of some 24 million tons of food and
equipment worth some $2.9 billion, and had paid substantial
salaries, whereas the American relief work Hoover had
administered during and after the First World War supplied
almost twice as much food and equipment, worth more than
double the amount sent by UNRRA. And all the principal
officers of the American Relief Administration under Hoover
were volunteers. 4 When Truman met Hoover in May 1945,
UNRRA was then gearing up to its maximum effort, which by
spring 1946 still covered less than 20% of the famine areas of
the world. And most of the food was going to areas controlled
by the communists. Germany was totally omitted, and Western
Europe received a relatively small share. 5

After Truman called on him a second time, in early 1946,
Hoover again agreed to help. He began his world food relief
effort by studying the world food situation from documents

available in Washington that showed there was considerably
more food on hand than the government had previously thought:
the reduction, according to Secretary of War Robert Patterson
[Patterson succeeded Stimson in 1945], was only 9% per capita
from pre-war. An amount of 1% per capita at world population
levels of the time meant a difference of enough food to increase
rations from starvation levels of around l,200cpd to survival
levels of around 2,000 for approximately fifty million people. 6
Hoover confirmed this in his report in the spring of 1946 when
he said after a world-wide survey that by the methods he
suggested, 'over 90% of the gap between supply and minimum
needs of the famine areas would be met 1 . 7 The Patterson papers
show conclusively that in US Cabinet discussions during one
severe crisis, in early 1946, the best informed Americans,
including President Truman, judged there had been enough food
ever since the end of the German war to feed everyone -including
Germans. The problem that Patterson encountered over and over
again was what he called the problem of 'priority 1 . Not shortage. 8

In the spring of 1946, Hoover continued the policy that had
succeeded so well during and after the First World War,
appealing to the voluntary generosity of the Americans because
he believed passionately in the United States of America. He was
convinced that the public opinion in the country normally
expressed good-will. The function of government was never to
tell people what to think; it was to do co-operatively what the
people could not do so well individually. A corollary to this might
be that anything proposed that was against public opinion did not
express good-will. Therefore it had to be kept secret. In the First
World War, Hoover raised money for Belgian relief by private
subscription as well as by accepting the accumulated savings of
the Belgian people. After the war, he raced around the US 'selling
goodness' at $l,000-a-plate dinners for Polish relief. He was
openly critical of John Kenneth Galbraith and President Franklin
Roosevelt for imposing price controls by law during the Second
World War, because he had led voluntary price controls in the
First, which had kept inflation lower than during 1939-1946.
Public opinion and the public will were everything to him: they
could scarcely be wrong. In any case, where he needed help for a
great public benefit, he appealed to the innate charity in Everyman.
He was never disappointed by the common man, only by statesmen.

Hoover broadcast an appeal to the American people in March
1946, just before leaving for a round-the-world mission by air to
visit the heads of thirty-eight states to discuss ways to feed the
starving. Hoover outlined the situation to the Americans, and
concluded with the words: 'I can only appeal to your pity and
your mercy. I know that the heart of the American people will
respond with kindliness and . . . compassion. Will you not take
to your table an invisible guest?' 9

Hoover's summation of the situation in early 1946 was brief
and to the point. 'The net result of our computations was that
approximately 313,000,000 people were confronted with the
problem of providing overseas [i.e. imports] food for some
1,400,000,000 hungry people in "deficit" countries.' The major
surplus countries to make up the shortfall were Canada, the
USA, Australia and Argentina. There was a gap in the fore-
seeable future between the need for 26,000,000 tons of cereals
and apparent supplies of around 15,000,000 tons. If the statis-
tics were correct, Hoover estimated that very soon some
800,000,000 people would starve. Most would die.

The Cabinet meeting on 29 March 1946 to discuss the food
problem, with Truman, Secretary of Agriculture Clinton
Anderson and Patterson, decided that 'the real trouble was one of
price, it being more profitable for the farmers today to feed their
grain to animals than to sell it as grain. The farmers were holding
wheat in an expectation of a price rise.' j_0 Truman was lifting
price controls so American grain farmers could get a free-market
price, which could only be afforded by the richer nations, who
were not starving. Later in the year, the Americans also solved
the rail-car problem that had been allowed to delay shipments
abroad. Patterson was vehement: T am impressed by the fact that
... the percentage of cars now used for grain has fallen 15%
below last year. Such a condition seems to me to be one which it
is indefensible for this government to tolerate in the face of the
imminent hunger confronting the populations of our occupied
areas . . .' 11

In his lengthy correspondence on the matter, Patterson constantly
refers to lack of priority, misallocation of rail cars and so on, not

to any production shortage. As we have seen, he told Secretary
of State George C. Marshall that the occupation would fail if
starvation conditions continued. He insisted that the famine had
been foreseen, but little done to prevent it. 12

The American price policy was a great problem for the Canadians,
as Prime Minister King pointed out in a 'most important 1 Cabinet
meeting in Ottawa in September 1946. 'The US are allowing the
price of wheat to be sold to England to go from $1.50 to $2.
Were we to do the same . . . altogether the result would very
shortly be the bursting of the price ceiling with rapid inflation
of prices.' 13.

In early 1946, the Canadians still had rationing and price
controls, and were generously giving away wheat or selling it
below market value to those who needed it most. 14 In February
1946, Prime Minister King was told by Norman Robertson, his
senior foreign affairs policy adviser, that 'Though the war ended
nearly six months ago, our food industry and Canadian con-
sumers are still on a wartime basis. Thus we rationed meat when
others [i.e. the Americans] were dropping controls. We cut our
rice consumption in half. We slashed sugar and butter rations
last year and took another big slice off butter consumption a few
days ago. We have always lived up to our commitments. We are
the only country in the world which has done so.' This was done
because 'the people of Canada will wish to make new efforts to
help meet a world shortage and will expect the government to
give advice and direction as to the form those efforts could most
effectively take'. 15

The Americans, who in autumn of 1945 had promised to ship
225 million tons of wheat abroad, had vastly exceeded their
target by June 1946. 16 Patterson was especially pleased by this
achievement. He wrote a letter to Truman on 8 July 1946 out-
lining what the United States had done to relieve suffering
around the world It is an extraordinary document, showing the
man in charge of the greatest war machine that had ever existed
delighting in how he had used his enormous power to feed the
starving.

He told Harry Truman that 'It gives me a great deal of personal
satisfaction to be able to say to you that ... by the middle of
this month we will have loaded and shipped the surprising total
of 417,000,000 bushels [of wheat] which is 17,000,000 more
than were ever committed by this government. It is all the
more remarkable because the requirement presented to the US
representative on the Combined Food Board a year ago was
225,000,000 bushels for the year and remained at that figure
until late Fall of 1945. Thanks are due to you for the vigorous
way in which you supported the [War] Department and its
efforts and to [others including] Herbert Hoover . . . 'He was
especially grateful to Col. Monroe Johnson and Captain
Granville Conway, 'without whose able handling of the trans-
portation problem our job could not have been done'. 17

By the end of 1946, Hoover was proclaiming triumph over
'the greatest famine in world history'. He claimed that hundreds
of millions of lives had been saved in the first world-wide
famine relief effort in human history. Only Germany was left
out. For the rest, it was an amazing creative achievement,
following on the most destructive war that mankind had ever
known. How did he do it?

Hoover travelled 35,000 miles and visited 22 countries in the
spring of 1946, arranging for food collection and distribution.
He travelled by a slow propeller-driven plane. He was 72 years
old. He co-ordinated supplies, improved transport, borrowed
from people in early-crop areas to feed others who repaid the
loan after their own crops came in; he appealed directly via
radio and print to Americans and Canadians to reduce consump-
tion of luxury foods, he helped to reduce spoilage, he improved
pricing policy, he humbled himself to beg in countries that had
surplusses not yet reported, he reduced reserve supplies, always
co-ordinating with the President's team. Together, Truman,
Anderson, Mackenzie King, Hoover and Patterson vastly reduced
the gap in supplies. J_8 By the end of the year, the gap between
need and production had vanished, although, as the situation in
Germany showed, production did not necessarily fill the evident
need.

Hoover's unshakable commitment was essential to success. For
instance, he flew to Argentina for talks with the dictator Juan
Peron, overriding the strong objections of the US State depart-
ment. But Hoover knew that Peron had over 1.6 million tons of
surplus food. He went to Peron's inaugural dinner because 'I
was resolved ... to eat even Argentine dirt if I could get the
1,600,000 tons.' 19 He ate the dirt, and Europe got the food.

Prime Minister King invited Hoover to Ottawa to make a speech
at the end of his world tour in June 1946. Hoover was generous
in his praise of the Canadian people: 'To Canada flows the grati-
tude of hundreds of millions of human beings who have been
saved from starvation through the efforts of this great Common-
wealth of the north.' He described the crisis, and then explained
how it had been met. 'In these two months since those estimates,
the world has developed even further additions to world supplies.
The Latin American states have greatly reduced their import
requirements during the crisis months.' But he warned that the
children were going to suffer terribly even if they did not die.
'Millions of mothers are today watching their children wilt before
their eyes.' The proof was in annual mortality rates that in some
cities were as high as 200%% per year. Children's TB cases in
Kiel in 1946 climbed to 70% more than in the previous years.
Hoover called for a renewed effort to save the children. 20

King wrote in his diary that Hoover told him in confidence
that in certain areas, not including Germany, he 'had found the
reports about starvation much exaggerated. When he got down
to discuss with technical officers the actual situation, he found it
in many countries quite different from that which the politicians
had been stating it was.' 21 This did not reduce the importance of
the work, but it certainly made Hoover's task easier, both
because some people had actually more food than he had been
told, and because the rich had more surplus.

The situation in Germany was in fact worse than press reports
indicated. A year after the war had ended, the Canadian Military
Mission in Berlin sent a telegram to External Affairs in Ottawa
saying that they had spoken to the British Food and Agricultural
Division that morning, who reported that no imports had been

programmed beyond the month of May. The date of the tele-
gram was 9 May 1946.

'Bread and potatoes constitute nearly two-thirds of civilian
ration,' said the Canadian telegram. 'British zone was conse-
quently faced with the prospect of being reduced from slightly
over 1,000 to about 450 calories [per day]. There was therefore
justification for statement that famine was just around the
corner.' 22

Patterson prompted Truman to turn to Hoover once again at
the end of 1946. After a talk with Hoover in December,
Patterson noted for his files, 'I said that ... he had been of great
value to us in obtaining sufficient food for the United States zone
in Germany earlier in the year; that we had difficult problems
relative to food at the present time, as to getting an adequate
supply to maintain a 1,550 ration in Germany and Austria
because of transportation troubles, as to the possibility of raising
the 1,550 ration to 1,800, this being primarily a fiscal matter . . .
I stated that we would be going to Congress next month for
additional funds to support the army food programs in the
occupied areas.' 23

When Truman's third call to Hoover came, in January 1947,
Hoover was ready. He was well aware that he might be loaded
with much responsibility and little authority, so he refused
Truman's first offer by returning the President's letter with
amendments giving him the right to investigate the effects of
American policy on Germany. This was the first time that such a
mandate had been asked of the powerful Executive branch.
Truman sent Hoover's letter to the State Department, the same
department that had authorized the illegal, secret and unilateral
denunciation of the Geneva Convention, 24 which was supposed
to have the force of constitutional law in the US, as we have seen.
The Department had also resisted Hoover's snooping before.

If there was not absolute dread in the State Department at the
thought of the energetic, truthful and compassionate Hoover
poking into this sordid affair, they had more sangfroid than it is
reasonable to assume. One likely reason that Truman at first
resisted Hoover's request was that the State Department advised

him to do so. Truman sent back to Hoover an equivocal version
of the requested mandate. That was enough for Hoover: he
would interpret the mandate as broadly as possible. Thus began
a mission that extended a mercy while it investigated a crime.
He brought back to the US thousands of pages of army and US
Military Government documents relative to the effect of Ameri-
can policy on Germany, all of them still in the Hoover Institu-
tion archives in Stanford, California.*

* They are at the foundation of this section of the book. To my
knowledge, they have never been used in extenso by any writer

before to describe Germany as it then was.

Hoover and travelling US diplomat Will Clayton met in January
1947 to discuss the disaster in the British- American zone of
Germany, where industrial production had been forced down to
28% of 1938 output. Food production in France and the UK had
actually dropped in the preceding year, partly because of the fall
in German industrial production which in turn was caused in
part by the destruction of German factories and machines, and
partly because of the cutbacks in fuel production. It was precisely
oil production that Henry Morgenthau had fought bitterly to ban
in 1945, among 500 other banned items. 25 The enforced
reduction in oil production was particularly damaging to the
farmers, because it meant that their tractors were useless, and
other machinery endangered. The reduction in coal meant that it
was much more difficult to transport food to processing and
preserving centres.

In 1945- 46 the democracies were concerned about starvation
around the world, excluding Germany. After that, the problem
was the politics of hostility towards Germany. The 9-10%
reduction in world food supply, if shared equally in the world,
would have meant a drop in North American consumption from
the existing average of about 3,300cpd to about 3,000cpd. 26
Since the long-term optimum for health in an active adult is
around 2,000 to 3,000cpd, depending on activity, temperature
and so on, the new level would have been healthier than the old.

In Germany, pre-war consumption had been about 3,000cpd,
and the nation on average had been 81-85% self-sufficient
in food production. It was never necessary to make war to get
food, or to get 'land for the German plow 1 , as Hitler had said.
This was underlined by the result of the survey conducted by the
US Army in summer 1945. The army discovered that the Ger-
mans had never been seriously short of food during the war, and
that their requisitions from foreign countries had been minor.

The exclusion of Germany from world relief was thought at
the time to be entirely the fault of the Germans themselves. It has
been repeatedly stated by Western historians that if Germany
was short of food, this was neither the fault nor the intent of the
Allies. The argument is simple: 'The war was the culprit, and the
Germans had started the war, so they should suffer first and
most. In difficult circumstances not of their own making, the
Allies generously fed the Germans from their own resources.
This they did at their own expense, many hundreds of millions of
dollars per year for each of the US and UK. Far from vengeance,
this was an unprecedented act of generosity.' In the words of the
British Select Committee on Estimates in London, 'It is probably
without parallel in history that twelve months after the end of a
war, Great Britain should be paying eighty million pounds a year
towards the upkeep of her principal adversary.' 29 It makes a
creditable ending to a grotesque war. But is it true?

A few facts support the theory. Many of the Allies in the summer
of '45 had no intention of imposing mass starvation on Germany.
A Canadian on Eisenhower's staff, Lt. Gen. A. E. Grasett, was
asked to report on the wheat situation, and wrote in June 1945 to
his chiefs at SHAEF that 'the wheat that will be arriving should be
adequate to prevent starvation', among the German civil popula-
tion. 30 Much wheat was sent to Germany intended for relief of
German civilians. But many people in high places, from Morgen-
thau down, were determined to impose a harsh vengeance on
Germany in the guise of preventing a resurgence of German
power. This would be easier to carry out if the public believed
that there was a world food shortage from 1946 on.

The statistics of world food production do not bear out the
official history. The food production of the world measured in

calories per capita in October 1945 by the US Office of Foreign
Agricultural Relations was 90% of pre-war levels. 31 Food
production in the world for 1945- 46 per capita outside the US
was about 12% below pre-war levels. 32 Distributed according
to need, this food would have been easily adequate to feed
everyone, because the pre-war average was well above basic
human need. For 1946- 47, world production was up by 7%,
meaning that, overall, it was very close to pre-war levels.' 33
It also means that much of the 3% shortfall was low production
in Germany. However, in Europe, the '1946 harvest was
surprisingly good', according to the World Food Appraisal
report of the UN, issued in December 1946. Wheat and rye
production was up one-third, to 80% of normal, potatoes up
18%), and sugar-beets up one-third to 66%> of pre-war level. 34

Since production in 1944-48 was running far higher than it
had before the war in the main producing/exporting countries,
Canada and the US, the critical factor then and later was the
availability of the Canadian-US surplus. 35 The United States,
Canada and several other major exporting countries began 1945
with a surplus of food. As Robert Patterson wrote to Mr Justice
Byrnes on 27 December 1944, US food production in 1944
equalled the all-time high set in 1942. The 1944 crop was 10%
higher than any year prior to 1942. Wheat, corn, rice and many
other crops broke all records. The fact was, Patterson said, there
was 'a surplus of food [in the US]'. 36

World food production was virtually normal in 1947, except in
Germany. Since the rest of the world was so close to normal, it
is clear that the reason for German starvation was not that there
was a fatal world shortage of food. Allied policies were respon-
sible for nearly all the excess deaths. The worst of the policies
of the four occupying powers was the confiscation of 25% of
the arable land of the country, together with the forced expul-
sions of nearly all the inhabitants into the damaged and shrun-
ken remainder. But this was not all. Another part of Allied
policy prevented the Germans from manufacturing goods to pay
for food imports; another part prevented them from collecting
food or cash in return for the billions of dollars' worth of goods
that were confiscated surplus to reparations; another part pre-
vented them from producing sufficient food for themselves;

another part prevented international relief agencies from pro-
viding them with food during the most critical first year to
year and a half of peace; and later, another part ordered food
to be supplied to them free by Allied taxpayers. Hoover later
wrote that under President Roosevelt, the American policy had
'accumulated blunders in administration which by January 1946
had endangered the lives of millions of people all over the
world 1 . 37

What was the Germans' agricultural capability in the summer
of 1945? The British Foreign Office said in 1947 that the area
occupied by the British and Americans was capable of producing
about l,750cpd for the local inhabitants, which was the produc-
tion before the war. Ambassador Robert Murphy agreed. 38

Lt. Col. Grasett reported in June 1945 that the US-UK-French
zone had been 60-70% self-sufficient before the war. This
meant a potential of 1,800 to 2,100cpd for those zones. Grasett
added the amazing fact that the cropland planted that spring was
97% of normal despite the bombing, lack of labour and military
campaigns that had just rolled through. 39 However, both
Hoover and the Foreign Office reported that German farmers
in the combined British and American zones actually produced
food enough for only about l,000cpd in 1946 and 1947. 40

It is clear from this that if the Germans in the west, unburdened
by refugees, had produced as much as their land would grow,
very few would have starved. But they didn't even get above
l,000cpd production despite tremendous incentive. Why not?

The British Foreign Office reported in July 1947 that this cata-
strophic fall in production was due to lack of labour, lack of
implements, lack of fertilizer and the increase in demand for
food caused by the refugees. 41 Robert Murphy agreed. 42 The
most important of these - labour, fertilizer and surplus mouths -
were caused by Allied policies.

The industrial production on which farming depends had been
around 105% of pre-war levels in late 1944 and early 1945, 43
showing that once the war production had been eliminated in
May 1945, there was sufficient to supply the existing level of

farm production. In spring 1945, about 60 to 70% of the pre-war
livestock were still alive. 44 It is clear that when the Allies took
over in May 1945, the potential for agricultural production in
west Germany was much higher than the food the Germans
received. The potential was almost enough to maintain life; it
was certainly enough to sharply reduce epidemic disease, which
occurs in starving populations.

This food potential had been achieved during the war despite
the absence of most of the German male labour force, despite
reliance on inefficient prisoner labour, despite the bombing,
military campaigns, and shortage of oil and transport.

What finally assured the prolonged starvation of Germans was
the enforced reduction of industry. By autumn 1945, industrial
production was deliberately reduced to around 25-30% of pre-
war levels, 45 thus preventing the chance of buying food imports.
This was not a consequence of the bombing or the military
campaign. The most heavily damaged area of Germany was the
Ruhr, where less than 30% of the plant equipment and machinery
was destroyed by war. In Germany as a whole, 80-85% of the
machinery and plant survived intact, 46 but in 1946 in the US
zone, exports were forced down to only 3% of pre-war levels. 47
The Allies slowed oil production to a trickle, closed down
factories, kept the male labour force imprisoned, confiscated or
destroyed factories and machinery, imposed restrictive financial
measures, reduced the postal service, and so on.

Food production and food imports came under specific attack
when the fishing fleet was prevented from going to sea for a
year, and the Western Allies drastically cut the production of
fertilizer. 48 By false accounting, the Allies also refused to credit
the value of some German exports to the German account,
making it impossible for Germans to earn foreign currency to
buy food. Baldly stated, many valuable goods were stolen,
beyond the reparations agreed among the Allies. 49 All foreign
governments and international relief agencies, including UNRRA
and the Red Cross, were prevented from assisting Germans for
the first critical year. By the time such pacifist organizations as
the Mennonites of Canada were permitted to send food to their
co-religionists in Germany, in June 1946, the overall death rate

in Germany had risen to more than double the normal rate. 50
So much food was confiscated by the invaders that the ICRC
was moved to complain in August 1945. 51 The ICRC had over
1,000 boxcars and 400 trucks actually shipping relief food into
Germany despite war damage in the spring of 1945. At least
three trains reached Ravensburg, Augsburg and Moosburg, but
were refused permission to unload by the Allies, who sent them
back with their food to Switzerland. From there, the Red Cross
returned the food to the original donors. 52 An exception to the
general rule appears to have been the arrival in Lubeck in autumn
1945 of three Swedish ships loaded with relief supplies intended
for Germans. It is not clear, however, that the supplies were
actually distributed to Germans. 53

As a result of the seizures of land and the expulsions in the east
by Poland and the USSR, about twelve million starving, penni-
less refugees poured into the remainder of Germany. In the
British zone between January 1946 and January 1947, more than
1,700,000 of these helpless people were imposed on the twenty
million original inhabitants. 54 Such were the avertable calamities
in the three Western zones that created the situation Hoover was
trying to correct.

Despite all the catastrophes of war, despite the loss of food from
the seized lands and the loss of the food production of the Soviet-
occupied zone, in the spring of 1945 the western Germans had at
least a hope of maintaining themselves without any imports. If
the Allies had not impeded them, there can hardly be any doubt
that they would have found a way to feed themselves a meagre
diet on their own land. Many lives would have been saved.

Another very odd aspect of all this is the fact that although the
British and Americans undoubtedly did send much wheat to
Germany in 1945- 48, the Germans themselves rarely got more
food than they produced themselves. Herbert Hoover and
assorted British officers all said at various times in 1945- 46 that
the Germans were producing around 1,000 to l,100cpd, but they
often received less than that. The ration actually received for
long periods in the British- American zone was around 1.000 cpd
and sometimes no more than 900. 55

The Germans themselves had of course recognized the desperate
plight of their children. They set up feeding programs in the cities,
but the scarcity of imported food limited their scope terribly. For
example, from 31 October 1945 to 31 March 1946 the welfare
authorities of the city of Kiel organized feedings for 1,000 school-
children, who got a warm midday meal of 500-600 calories.
Parents paid 10 pfennig, but money was also contributed by the
British soldiers of Sperrzone F. At first only 6% of the city's
children could be fed, despite the fact that 20-25% were under-
nourished. Thus the aid went only to the neediest. In order to help
as many as possible, each 'class' was fed for only ten weeks, then
replaced by another. 56

By 1946, the Germans were dying in such large numbers, proba-
bly about double the pre-war average, that the ban on private aid
was slowly relaxed. 57 Early in the year, the Allies set up the
CARE Organization (Co-operative for American Remittances to
Europe), covering 22 independent US charities. CRALOG (Coun-
cil of Relief Agencies Licensed for Operation in Germany) was
set up in February to supervise sixteen American independent
charitable organizations. 58

The Germans in the three western zones co-operated through
their own large charitable organizations such as the Hilfswerk
der Evangelischen Kirchen in Deutschland, Deutsche Caritas-
verband, Arbeiterwohlfahrt and Deutsche Rote Kreuz [whose
work had been curtailed immediately after the war because of
suspected Nazi elements in the administration].

These organizations banded together to form the Zentral-
ausschuB zur Verteilung auslandischer Liebesgaben, with
headquarters in the seaport city of Bremen. 59 The Zentral-
ausschuB authorized the delivery and distribution of foreign aid
that had finally begun trickling in. According to the German
author Gabriele Stuber, the reliable infrastructure of these Ger-
man welfare agencies helped to ensure an equitable distribution
to those in greatest need.

The grisly mortality rates for children quoted by Hoover to
Mackenzie King certainly applied to the Germans ahead of all
others. Yet Hoover had to beg the American Military Governor,

Lucius Clay, to improve the official ration, which had been cut
from slow starvation at 1,550 cpd to 1,275, effective from 1st
April 1946.

Hoover was typically generous when the autocratic Lucius Clay
swallowed his pride to make his own appeal to him for help.
Hoover replied: 'Feeding the enemy requires no debate with
me, since it must be done for many reasons. 1 He urged Clay to
restore the 1,550 calorie level, promising to do his best to
arrange immediate help. But as Hoover wrote: 'The General
apparently determined to take no risks and held to the reduced
1,275 calories - which was below the endurance level.' 60 Even
this might not be maintained, and in fact was not, as Patterson
was 'deeply disturbed' to note in May 1947. He told Anderson
that the situation in both Germany and Austria was 'extremely
critical'. 61 He also told Secretary of State George Marshall in
June 1947 that the 'average ration for the last six weeks has been
1,200 calories, and in many places it is as low as 900 calories . . .
this is slow famine . . . the British ration [in the UK] is 2,900
calories per day, the average American consumes 3,300 ..,' 62

Clay did lift one restriction that had prevented Americans from
sending CARE food-relief packages to Germany. As Hoover
pointed out, some Americans imbued with 'the spirit of the
Morgenthau Plan' had 'invented the warning that [relief]
packages would all go to the "upper classes" so our military
authorities had refused to allow the distribution of CARE
packages . . .' 63 The many letters of thanks received from the
grateful recipients demonstrate that the CARE packages were not
going to the 'upper classes'. Even the smallest CARE packages
lifted the spirits of the parents and children. To receive even one
half of a CARE package so cheered Deacon Wilhelm Lorenz in
Kiel in the British zone that he wrote, in May 1947:

You will think it is not very much since it is intended for
the sixty-five students and seventy small children we have
in our care. Quite the contrary. For us it is a great deal to get
our hands on such a thing in these scarce times. We are able
to create with it much joy. For us even the smallest help is
worthwhile. 64

In happy contrast to the situation in Germany, conditions in
Holland, Belgium and France 'are much better than had been
anticipated 1 , Mackenzie King was told by the former Premier of
France, Leon Blum, in August 1946. King had no trouble
believing this, because he had already heard from the Canadian
Military Mission in Berlin that the Belgians were flourishing.
They had eggs and steaks, and queues for food were small and
rare. 65 According to the United Nations, 'the United Kingdom,
although a major food importing country, still maintained a diet
which though much less varied than in normal times, reaches
about 90% of the pre-war calorie level.' 66 Germany and
Italy were much worse off than the others. 67

The US Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson had told
Truman the same thing in March 1946. He said that 'the food
situation had been thus far nearly normal in the Scandinavian
countries, Britain, Holland, Belgium and France. As for Italy,
one of the principal troubles was faulty distribution . . . the sit-
uation was not good in Germany . . . [General McNarney felt]
deep concern about the food situation in the United States zone
in Germany'. 68

The first few CRALOG packages arrived in the US zone in
February 1946. 69 The Evangelische Hilfswerk distributed
packages in the US zone in April 1946, but it was not until
October 1946 that the Hilfswerk distributed parcels in the British
and French zones.

In the US zone the military government would not allow other
aid organizations outside CRALOG members to operate. Robert
Kreider, representing the Mennonite Central Committee as a
member of the first CRALOG delegation, came to Berlin in
March 1946 and later worked in Stuttgart under the US military
government. For a pacifist Mennonite like Kreider it was an
unusual experience:

We were assigned billets in a requisitioned apartment house,
issued mess cards, PX cards [ 'Post Exchange' : the US
military retail store], clothing ration cards, photographed for
our military pass, issued currency control booklets. Never in

my life have I felt so enveloped in the military ... I am
confident that our civilian dress and status will have its
rewards as we proceed with our work. It is best that we be
not too closely identified with the conquering power.
Frequently I experience sharp pains of conscience in regard
to our comfortable existence. In the officers' mess we eat far
better than we did at home, and then on our doorstep are the
German people who live on a 1,275 calorie-a-day ration.
Only if we can be an instrument of bringing food to these on
our doorstep can we atone for the sin of which we personally
are a part. 70

In the Mennonite archives at Goshen, Indiana, is a letter from
Kreider describing the relations between the US military
government and the efforts of the Mennonites. 'The AMG
(American Military Government), apart from the Welfare
Branch, apparently is none too keen on CRALOG - as military
men only tolerating this civilian group ... we are happy to co-
operate fully with the other agencies in this joint relief distribu-
tion effort of CRALOG. As demonstrated by our work in Eng-
land, France, Italy, Belgium etc. - our relief concerns go far
beyond the needs of our own group. In Germany our concern
is beyond the needs of our own people.' 7J_

The Mennonites, through the Evangelische Hilfswerk in parti-
cular, helped to supply school feeding programs. Twenty tons
of Mennonite flour went into a feeding program for 72,000
children in Greater Hesse, who received Brotchen, or 100-gram
rolls, which the children said were 'better than cake!'. 72

Cornelius Dyck arrived in Kiel in the British Zone as a
CRALOG representative for the Mennonite Central Committee
of the US and Canada in late December 1946. By 13 January
1947 he had arranged facilities to feed 5,000 children in Kiel
aged from three to six. 73 A further 6,000 were fed from Swiss
aid. The German Red Cross, with foreign help, took on another
2,500. Food was given out in the form of a warm meal (usually
soup) served in the local schools. But before the children could
even walk the snowy streets to school for food, the Swiss had to
distribute 1 ,000 pairs of shoes to the barefoot. Huge kettles left
kitchens set up in the dismantled Germania-Werft factory and

were carried in trucks fuelled by British gasoline. Sometimes in
this particularly severe winter of 1946- 47 the kettles had to be
dragged by hand through the snow near the schools when the
trucks got stuck in unplowed drifts. At the end of the initial
feeding in April it was decided to continue feeding 7,500 espe-
cially undernourished children in Kiel. As late as 1949, more
than a third of the schoolchildren in Kiel were barefoot. 74

Similar programs were set up in Lubeck, and Krefeld in the
British zone. In the French zone there were a number of child-
feeding projects in the cities and in the Saar area where 9,000
children were fed by the Hilfs-AusschuB, a committee with re-
presentatives from at least four German agencies. In Ludwigs-
hafen 8,000 children between the ages of six and fourteen got
a 300-500 calorie meal six times a week.

By the summer of 1947 the Mennonite Central Committee was
reaching approximately 80,000 people in feeding operations
in Germany. Of the more than 5,815 tons of food, clothing,
Christmas bundles and other supplies sent to Europe by Ameri-
can and Canadian Mennonites by the summer of 1947, nearly
4,000 tons went to Germany. 75

Other donations arrived from the United States and Canada,
especially from Lutheran Church members, and citizens of
German background, and various non-denominational charities
like the Save the Children fund. Sweden and Switzerland and
later Denmark 76 made large contributions. British relief agencies
belonging to COBSRA (Council of British Societies for Relief
Abroad) had been working along with the French Mission
Militaire de Liaison Administrative in the British 12th Army
Group area even before UNRRA teams arrived. By the summer
of 1945 COBSRA had 1,500 relief workers operating in the
British zone, but their contribution was directed towards sup-
plying and helping displaced persons rather than German civi-
lians. 77 In the summer of 1945, Eisenhower had forbidden the
North American Quakers to come to Germany to help orphans
who were wandering the streets 'unaccompanied 1 . He had also
recommended to the War Department that this policy be kept
secret. 78 But finally, one year later, Canadian, British and
American Quaker personnel were allowed to take care of the

children. It is painful to imagine what happened to the orphaned
children in the year when help was banned.

In July 1946 the Irish Red Cross initiated a programme to bring
more than 400 German children to Ireland for a three-year
period of recuperation. In 1948, 100 children were given a six-
month holiday at Glencree in Ireland, special preference being
given to children aged between five and eleven whose fathers
were dead or missing due to the war. Some of these children
later reminisced that they had at first refused a banana or an
orange because they had never seen one before, and remembered
how they had thought that chocolates were shiny buttons. 79

In the spring of 1947, in the midst of the worst food crisis since
1945, a new programme entitled Hoover Aid ('Hoover-Spende')
was planned to broaden the scope of the school feeding operation
to more children throughout Germany. Many mothers and fathers
breathed a sigh of relief at the assurance that their children would
at last be fed. The programme was massive: over 4-6 million
schoolchildren in the Bizone [newly combined British- American
zone] would be involved, 2.8 million in the British zone and 1.8
million in the American zone. The price per meal was to be
between 15 and 25 pfennig. But then the disastrous news came:
not enough food was available. The number of participants was
cruelly cut, from 4.6 to 3.55 million, 2.15 in the British zone, and
1 .4 million in the US zone. For some areas in the British zone
such as Schleswig-Holstein, which had abandoned its own school
feeding programs to make way for the Hoover-Spende, the new
guidelines meant that at first fewer children could be served than
under the old programme. According to the new quotas, of the
500,000 schoolchildren there, only 50% could be involved at one
time. These quotas were especially hard on those Stadtkreise and
Landkreise which were coping with a huge influx of expellees
from the east, many of whom were children.

By June 1947 it was decreed in Schleswig-Holstein that only
children who were at least 15% underweight or had severe health
problems would be able to take part. In March the following year,
meals were reduced from six to five days a week in order to be
able to accommodate more children. Schleswig-Holstein was not
the only area forced to reduce the numbers fed in 1947- 48. In

Niedersachsen, 52.8% of the schoolchildren, i.e. about 500,000,
were categorized as in bad health, but of these only 330,000
children obtained a meal supplement under the Hoover Plan. 80

The need for extra feeding for children persisted for years. In
Bonn in 1949, after the currency reform, 19,000 meals were still
being given out every day at a cost of 1 5 Dpf per meal and the
kitchens were not closed until April of that year. 81 As late as the
summer of 1950 the state health department of Schleswig-Holstein
felt the urgent need to continue the school feeding programs
because 60 to 70% of their school children were still under-
nourished. 82

The Allies set up various agencies to 'control' relief into Germany,
but clearly a large part of their purpose was not to control but to
eliminate relief. One Quaker said, 'The US Army made it difficult
for relief.' This is a forgiving understatement considering that they
were physically barred for a whole year when the starvation was
most acute. 83 As we have seen, thousands of truckloads of
supplies from Switzerland, Sweden and Ireland were refused
entry in 1945 and 1946. 84 A few were sneaked in illegally
simply through the benevolence of the local Allied commander.
The Swiss Relief Fund started a private charity to feed a meagre
meal once a day to a thousand Bavarian children for a couple of
months. As soon as the US zone occupation authorities discove-
red what was going on, they 'decided that the aid . . . should not
at once be accepted'. 85 The army informed the ICRC that 'public
opinion in the US would not allow' private charity to go to
Germany. They offered no evidence for this. All the evidence of
the elected representatives of the people of the US, in the
speeches of Senators Wherry, Langer and others, had shown just
the opposite. While the local army officers were telling this lie to
the Swiss, Secretary of War Patterson, in charge of that very army
was, as we have seen, working as hard as he could to get food to
Germans. And in the UK 'even the concept of voluntary aid via
food parcels from Britain's civilians was anathema to Whitehall'
in October 1945. Such aid to Germans was forbidden. 86

The modern historian comes away from these documents and
interviews under the impression that for a significant time after
1945, the hidden purpose of the armies, CRALOG and other

such supposedly charitable agencies was to camouflage the
elimination of charitable aid to Germany. It was not therefore
any paucity of private aid that caused the Germans to starve, but
the bureaucratic entanglements the private agencies had to fight.
In the hungriest year of all, 1947, CRALOG's top ten voluntary
agencies sent to Germany about 26,000,000 lbs of relief material
all told. 87 Even if all of this had been food, which was not the
case, it would have supplied perhaps eight ounces per year per
person in the western zones. This cynical tokenism was why
Kreider's conscience bothered him.

The high prices caused by low industrial production were an
important cause of European urban food shortages in 1947.
This low production was in large part a result of low activity in
Germany. The farmers of Europe simply withheld some of their
surplusses from the market because the people in the cities were
producing so little of value to trade. Will Clayton and Hoover
had discovered that the farmers were hoarding food while people
in the cities were starving. 88 The British Foreign Secretary,
Ernest Bevin, blamed the price rise for the suffering in Britain
and for the need to impose bread rationing in peacetime. 'The
rise in prices has thrown us a year out [in recovery],' he told
Will Clayton in June 1947. 89 Short of exports to earn foreign
currency, Britain simply could not afford to pay for all the
foreign wheat that she wanted and that was available.

A memorandum by Will Clayton sent to Under-Secretary of
State Dean Acheson on 27 May 1947 predicted that in Europe
'millions of people would soon die' 90 unless the Allies faced the
'grisly facts' of their occupation policies. 91 Clayton is here
saying, a little more vaguely, what Robert Murphy had already
said of the Germans with more detail in his secret reports to
Washington of that same spring.

As a humanitarian with a clear world view and strong sense of
history, Hoover was under no illusions about the cause of
Germany's plight. He had visited Hitler in his new chancellery in
Berlin in 1938, which was apparently a massive stone and
marble building. But Hoover visited it again in 1946, and saw
what the Allied bombs had revealed: the marble was ersatz,
merely plaster of Paris spread on nets of twine that now hung in

shreds from the gaping roof. 'Having seen the results of Hitler's
vengeance on the Poles and remembering the millions who had
died in his rape of Europe ... I had no pity for his ending.' 92 But
he also knew that it was pointless to continue the vengeance, for
this meant that 'mass destitution and prevention of sheer starvation
had become the burden of the victors. No man with a vision that
the world would have to bury the hatchet sometime if civilization
were to survive, had sat in on these decisions' to starve Germans,
he wrote. 93

The Canadians, like the Americans, were exceptionally farsighted
and generous, giving away billions to the British, French and
others. The total Canadian aid to the UK in 1939- 50 is unmeasu-
rable in precise terms, but in 1997 dollars, it probably amounted
to well over $100 billion.

This was done even though the Canadians had a very wry view
of the likelihood of a massive outpouring of gratitude. They did
not even expect that people would remember the help once it
had ended. Prime Minister King in 1944 received from Norman
Robertson the comment that 'Canada's main contribution to the
rehabilitation and settlement in Europe will be in the field of
UNRRA, where we shall probably be the main source of supply
of many of the basic food products so desperately needed. This
should have a most favourable effect in advertising Canada, but
by the time Stage III [of the relief program] is reached, UNRRA's
free distribution of food will probably be over and nations and
people have notoriously short memories in cases of benevo-
lence.' 94

But there were millions who did remember, at least for a while.
Hoover received birthday greetings from a whole schoolful of
children and teachers in July 1948:

Dear Mr Hoover

We have learnt that on August 10 you celebrate your 75th
birthday. For many years you have devoted your work and
care to ease the lives of poor suffering fellow-creatures, so that
your name is now known all over the world and particularly
the countries of Europe which have most suffered in and after

the war - among them our poor Austria - are all greatly
indebted to you for your having started the 'CARE parcel
action'.

The school, a seminary for young students thinking of the
priesthood, had been closed in 1938 by the anti-Christian Nazis,
who were trying to destroy the church. The school reopened in
autumn 1945, 'although we have become very poor ... all
appliances for teaching, our whole library, all our linen, and
nearly all the furniture has been destroyed during the Russian
occupation, neither our teachers nor our pupils will lose heart . . .
Our whole establishment, dear Sir, comprising 250 students and
16 teachers, join in sending you their best and heartiest wishes
with the expression of their most devoted thankfulness.' It was
signed by F. Seidl, Direktor, the Furstbischofliche Knaben-
seminar of Graz, Austria. 95

One letter of request, dated 5 February 1948, shows that the
Germans were starving even at that date, almost three year after
the war's end, and while the Marshall Plan was getting under way.
Aloyus Algen of the Rheinland wrote to the Committee of the
American Aid to Children, as follows:

Dear Mr Hoover

With this letter I take the liberty of asking you for a parcel
containing underwear, shoes and food. We are six persons
in our family and if we do not get help, we will perish, since
we are poor and haven't anything to eat or wear. You can
hardly imagine how close to death we are. If only you could
send a pair of shoes to each of us (size 6, 7, 9, 11, 13), some
shorts and underwear for men and stockings. 96

Hoover's estimate that the food campaigns had saved 800
million lives from at least one fatal famine shows the astounding
scale and compass of the work. Even 10% of that number of
lives saved was more than had been lost in the entire war, the
most devastating in hymnan history. Yet today, as Robertson had
calmly predicted, this immense, unprecendented charity is largely
forgotten.

Among the millions of refugees who surged through Germany
in 1945 were thirty to forty thousand ethnic German Mennonites,
who had been savagely persecuted under Stalin then ordered to
leave the USSR by the retreating Wehrmacht.

Some of these ended up in Berlin in 1946, where they were
cared for in part by the Canadian Mennonites Peter and Elfrieda
Dyck. 97 These people gave the Christian feast of the Eucharist a
new meaning one day, in a German commercial bakery which
they paid to bake their bread from flour sent from Canada. One
of the baker's apprentices noticed bits of printed paper whirling
around in the dough in the blending machine one morning. He
switched off the machine to discover remnants of Bibles. Aware
of Hitler's persecution of the churches, the Mennonites in
Saskatchewan who had made the flour had also stuffed Bibles
into the sacks to make sure they fed the soul along with the body.
The German baker threw up his hands and exclaimed 'Mein
Gott!', thinking the flour was spoiled. But Elfrieda and Peter
Dyck told him to turn up the heat a few extra degrees, and bake
away. As Peter Dyck commented, 'To feed on God's word didn't
hurt anyone. It usually doesn't.' And he told the puzzled baker,
'Read Ezekiel, chapter three.'

'Moreover he said unto me, Son of Man, eat that thou findest;
eat this roll, and go and speak unto the House of Israel. So I
opened my mouth and he caused me to eat that roll . . . and it
was in my mouth as honey for sweetness.' (Ezek. 3:1-3)

All of the astonishing generosity of the majority of the American
people issued finally in the Marshall Plan, which has dominated
much of Western thinking about Allied policy in Germany in
1945- 50. It is widely judged to be a fine example of the spotless
virtue of the West, one of the proofs of the farsighted wisdom
that animated Allied governments in their European policies.
All over the West today, the belief prevails that the Americans
generously helped the Germans 'get back on their feet after the
war'. According to this widespread belief, the German economic
miracle was, to an important degree, America's doing.

Here was a generous policy openly debated and heartily
approved by public opinion. Marshall Plan funds were even

offered to the Soviet Union, which haughtily turned them down.
Then, at considerable cost to the American taxpayers Europeans
were offered funds for reconstruction and development, on a
matching funds basis, i.e. that the European nation had to put
up as much development capital as was taken from the Marshall
fund. The policy passed Congress, and was signed by President
Truman in April 1948, becoming effective in a remarkably short
time with little opposition. It was strongly supported by public
opinion, which had been demanding just such a turn in policy
since 1945. There is no doubt that in 1948 it helped re-elect
Truman and most of those Senators and Congressmen who
supported it. The Marshall Plan was a great expression of the
public opinion that is commonly supposed to be free, wise and
kind. It was never regretted and nowhere deplored. Except by
Stalin.

The Germans were at first excluded, but within a year, the
plans were expanded to include them. This was one small part of
the German 'economic miracle'. Although they needed more, it
was understandable that they would receive less than any other
nation, around half per capita of the sum allotted to the UK, and
less than 60% of the amount the French got. Between 3 April
1948 and 30 June 1952, the Germans got $39 per person, the
French $72, and the British $77. [The equivalent in today's
money is probably above 10 x the amounts shown. 98 ]. The
effect was magical. The change in Germany, with this and with
currency reform, was almost miraculous. According to General
Maurice Pope, who was with the Canadian Military Mission in
Germany in 1948, following the end of the blockade and the
currency reform 'conditions improved overnight. . . [soon] the
modest corner grocery store was displaying delicacies of all
kinds and at quite reasonable prices'. 99 Within months, the
German economy was plainly reviving; within a year it was
expanding faster than any other European economy; and with-
in a decade Germany was close to the richest country on the
continent. Soon after that the Germans possessing almost no
natural resources and very little land, were the richest people in
Europe. They paid back to the US nearly every dollar they had
received in aid. 100

The Germans actually received about $1.4 billion, and they
repaid around $ 1 billion, leaving them with $0.4 billion in
out-right gifts. Britain received eight times as much, about
$3,176,000,000; the French $2,706,000,000 and the Italians
$1,474,000,000. Only the Germans paid back any of their
Marshall Plan money. 101

The German repayment was not their only contribution to
reconstructing the damage they had caused. Reparations pro-
bably exceeded by far the initial estimates of $20 billion to go
to all Allies. Not only were some of the 'reparations' no better
than theft, they also went on under cover as late as 1948.
Officials in President Truman's administration denied that
reparations were continuing, but Herbert Hoover told the
Governor of New York, who was then campaigning against
Truman, that he had evidence that the process was still going
on. Hoover also said that the reparations policy had cost the
American taxpayers about $600,000,000 per year for food
because the Germans were not allowed to manufacture enough
for export to buy the necessary imported food. According to
Hoover, the destruction or removal of factories for reparations
from Germany kept the Germans 'in degeneration and idleness'.
American, British and French manufacturers enriched themselves
at the expense of their fellow taxpayers, who were paying some
of the occupation costs. 102

Herbert Hoover's team in Germany in 1946 found much tying
going on about economic conditions among US occupation
officers. A US Navy intelligence officer in Berlin told the
Hoover Famine Emergency Commission in 1946: 'The figures
on economic output can be believed only one-fifth - the rest is
doctored to make a good impression with top levels. The lower
personnel is permeated with Morgenthau people.' 103 Secretary
of State George Marshall himself was party to the cover-up,
according to the expert and eminent American author John
Gimbel in his pioneering study of US policy in Germany,
Science, Technology and Reparations. The sub-title is signi-
ficant: 'Exploitation and Plunder in Post-war Germany'.

At a meeting of Foreign Ministers in Moscow in 1947, Molotov
told George Marshall to his face that the Americans were taking

valuable reparations without reporting them in the official
reparations account that all the Allies were supposed to keep.
Gimbel writes, 'Marshall responded angrily - a manner quite
uncharacteristic of him, as an esteemed observer commented. 1
Marshall angrily told Molotov - and the world - that the Ame-
ricans were giving away for nothing the most valuable part of
their reparations, the documents, patents, processes, technical
know-how, samples, blueprints and so on, which they were
taking from the Germans. Marshall's State Department estimated
the worth of the American haul at the time at an incredibly low
figure, around $10 million. 104

Gimbel has combed the Hoover and National archives and
discovered a long history of falsification and cover-up on this
subject. He concludes that Marshall's angry statement in Moscow
was 'distorted, misleading and propagandist^'. 105 The State
Department then and later refused to place a value on the
reparations, but they can scarcely have been less than the Soviet
reparations, because the motive was the same, the Western
businessmen avaricious, the resistance weak, and the Western
Allies occupied much the richer part of Germany. The American
Colonel Gerald B. O'Grady, chief industry officer for OMGUS
[Office of the Military Governor - United States] in Wurttemberg-
Baden, said, 'I totally disapprove of such robbery . . . practically
none [of the investigators] are here in the interest of any govern-
ment, but for purely personal gain.' 106 One German estimate
that Gimbel quoted was that the Allies took between $4.8 billion
and $12 billion in intellectual property alone, apart from the
seizure of foreign assets and shipping, and the machinery, food,
timber and coal that flowed out east and west. 107

Gimbel is very clear on the myth-making that went on: 'Histo-
rians of the Marshall Plan have fallen into a familiar trap. They
have [described] what must have been the reasons for the origins
of the Marshall Plan ... by extrapolation, rather than by interpre-
tation of documents, sources and contemporary evidence . . .
government officials were not averse to misleading the public.
State Department and other officials often simply told the Con-
gress, the press, the American people or whomever, what they
wanted to tell them at a given time, and they often did so without
regard for what was true and accurate.' 108 And of course histo-

rians using the 'must have been 1 theory uncritically accept what-
ever story has by then become predominant.

To revise history this way largely means to ignore the evidence.
The creation of the world food shortage belief depended, and
still depends today, upon aversion to the facts. It might be
called a world truth shortage. One of the most important sets of
papers bearing on this post-war food problem has been ignored
by historians. 109 This is in the collection of the papers of Robert
Patterson, who as Secretary of War in 1945- 47 had a great deal
to do with solving the food problems abroad. Much of this
material was declassified for the first time in 1 993 during research
for this book. 110 Nowhere in the hundreds of pages of letters,
memos, notes of meetings, or draft manuscript, is there anything
to show that Patterson or his Cabinet colleagues thought the
shortages in Germany were caused by a world shortage of food.

The Western Allies understandably exaggerated the amount
of money it was costing US and British taxpayers to feed the
Germans a starvation diet. Freely to feed a vanquished enemy
who had committed such horrors was unprecedented among the
nations, so they were proud of their magnanimity. But, as
Gimbel found, 'the actual costs of the German occupation to the
British and American taxpayers were much smaller than those to
be found in the heavily inflated figures that circulated publicly
and in the Congress at the time'. Ill The Western Allies hid what
they were doing under a false accounting system: 'Germany's
exports of coal, timber and "invisibles" . . . were never classified
as reparations and they have not been regarded as such by
historians.' 1 12

German reparations, taken by every ally as soon as the war
ended, were astronomically high. By the most conservative
estimates, they amounted to at least US $20 billion, which would
be somewhere in the region of many hundreds of billions in
1997, given the inflation and increase in economies since
1950. 113 Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky told Churchill in 1945
that the Soviets expected to take $10 billion of the $20 billion in
overall reparations which the Soviets judged they could pay. 114
The minimum worth of German reparations to the US was proba-
bly around $5 billion. 115 The British and Americans between

them took at least $10 billion in reparations for war damages,
the French less. No one can be sure of the amount the Germans
actually 'owed', because war damage could only be assessed
according to the damage itself, and to the degree of war guilt.
Certainly the amount was huge, and certainly the Germans have
repaid well over $100 billion since 1945, and are still paying the
relatives of some of the Nazis' victims.

The main point of reparations was to restore so far as possible
the well-being of Germany's victims, but since this was neglected
in favour of punishing Germans en masse, Hitler's victims
suffered further. We see here again Chekhov's Sakhalin
discovery, which had been repeated in the Gulag and then in
Hitler's slave camps: a starved hen lays no eggs. The more the
Germans were punished, the less they restored the economy of
Europe. There was almost universal agreement among the
American government experts in 1948 that the Marshall Plan
could not succeed without 'major industrial production from
Germany', as John Gimbel said. 1 16 The significant measure for
reparations, therefore, was how much Germany could contribute
to restoring the European economy, whether by reparations or by
trade. Only the first option was chosen.

The Americans took from Germany at least twenty times the
amount the Germans retained under the Marshall Plan. They
took possibly far more than that. It was at least $ 1 billion more
than the whole Marshall Plan devoted to the UK, France, Ger-
many, Italy and Austria. Clearly the Marshall Plan was generous
and far-sighted, a typically American good idea, which would
not have been possible without German money.

Reparation was only one aspect of the policies that the Allies
tried to pursue. Many skilled Americans and British made
energetic efforts to teach Germans democracy during the first
years of the occupation, but failed because of German bitterness
caused by the policy of vengeance. This attempt and failure had
their parallels in the French zone as well. In the French zone, the
starving Germans were offered tickets to performances by French
artists. Fed even less than the starvation rations in the neigh-
bouring zones, the Germans did not respond enthusiastically
to a lecture by a novelist, or a concert by the likes of Edith Piaf.

In the summer of 1945, the British wisely installed Konrad
Adenauer in office as Lord Mayor of Cologne, but then ordered
him to cut down Cologne's famous trees to feed the furnaces that
winter. When Adenauer refused, the British angrily kicked him
out of office.

The reason for the failure was clearly expressed by an editorial
in the Marburger Presse in 1949, commenting on the six
German workers who had just been sentenced to prison for
refusing the help dismantle a factory in Dortmund. 'The Allies
criticize us Germans for deferring to authority, try to educate us
to be democrats, but demand respect for Allied authority.' The
Germans felt that the dismantling had gone much too far, and
that to resist it showed democratic reaction to oppression. 117

The Germans missed the point. There was no democracy
because the Allies ruled by force; the Allies ruled by force to
make sure the Germans did not rule them by force. Nevertheless,
the Allies were not wholly hypocrites: if the Marburger Presse
editor had been able to look forty years into the future, he would
have been astonished to see Germany largely democratic, and
Allied troops protecting it.

But the Americans also missed the point. Democracy is not
rule by fear. The more a government rules by threat of force, the
less it is democratic. 'Seek not to enslave hearts, and all hearts
will be yours,' Voltaire said. 118

In that same small city of Marburg in the American zone in 1945,
prisoners returning from the American prison camp nearby told
of trucks taking away fifty starved bodies every night to a secret
burial site hidden from the Germans. A huge influx of expellees
from the east arrived, virtually all of them women, children and
old, feeble men. They added to the housing problem, subtracted
from the food supply and could scarcely find work. Wild rumours
spread around the country because all the press, radio, teaching
and publishing were controlled by the Allies, and so were not
fully believed. Gimbel notes: 'The American occupation gave rise
to a strain of anti-American sentiment among even the most
democratically-inclined Germans and provided them with a
convincing rationale for that sentiment.' 119 The Germans

demonstrated throughout the British and American zones for an
end to demolition and the restrictions on manufacture for export.
The British played an ambivalent game, especially with the coal
miners, trying to increase their production while simultaneously
reducing their food rations. In 1946 and again in 1947, the
standard of living of the coal miners actually deteriorated, des-
pite increased production. The major reason was that the British
were paying only $10.50 per ton while the European market
price was more than double that, sometimes triple. If the Ger-
mans had received full value for their work, there would have
been little need for subsidies from the British tax-payers. 120

The Germans felt that the Americans were hypocrites,
beginning with President Truman at the top and going right
down to the lowest private in the occupation forces. The
Americans talked a lot about the spirit of justice, love, and
forgiveness, but it was not much in evidence among the
Americans in Germany, at least not those in OMGUS. 121

What you learn from studying history is how little mankind
learns from studying history. The learning is bound to be min-
imal wherever history is managed to benefit the mighty. After
fifty years all officials in the West are still denying the mass
deaths in the French and American prison camps; only in
Germany are the deaths of the two million expellees remem-
bered and mourned. No one anywhere has remarked on the fact
that five to six million more people disappeared entirely from the
German population without note, or explanation. No historian,
whether British, French, Russian, American, Canadian or German
- not even a German historian - has remarked on this. Millions of
people disappear under the Allies' rule, and no one notices.

Victorious generals are always in training to fight the last war,
and diplomats may be no better. One of the effects of the
Morgenthau Plan was that the West, chiefly the US, went on
fighting the war long after they had won. While the democracies
were concentrating primarily on the vanished German danger,
they continued to help the Soviet Union. Western policy was
anarchically ambivalent for the first few years after the war. The
West gave the Soviets great help as part of the momentum of the
wartime alliance; the West also began to oppose Soviet expan-

sionist ambitions. Despite the great tension over Poland and
Eastern Europe, the Allies were still sending massive quantities
of supplies to the Russians in late 1946. The Canadians sent over
1.6 million tons of wheat in three months during that summer,
the Americans more than that, and the Argentinians contributed
greatly as well. From Canada went electrical machinery, steel
rails and so on; from the USA, all kinds of supplies except
weapons were sent. But at the same time, the Americans
especially put up fierce resistance to attempts by the Soviets to
expand their influence into Azerbaijan, Japan and the Darda-
nelles.

All this help given the Soviets was free. It was the physical
expression of the overall policy of trying to get along with the
Russians to build a better world. This was happening at the time
when the Russians were spying on Canada's top-secret, atomic
program, the most advanced in the world at the time after the
Americans. In September 1945, Igor Gouzenko defected to the
Canadians, taking with him documentary proof of the Soviet
treachery. Eventually twelve persons were convicted of spying,
the most dangerous spy success against the West of the twentieth
century, except perhaps for the Rosenbergs in the US. The stolen
secrets enabled the Soviets to build their first atomic bomb. The
tranquil flow of aid and the court case went on simultaneously.

To experience is to learn, whether the experience becomes
history or not. In 1997 the human race is experiencing events
similar to those we experienced in 1945. Now it is democracy's
greatest enemy that lies broken, while America's leaders prepare
to fight shadowy enemies. They see the danger of the drug lords,
terrorists, crackpot dictators and jungle leaders who defend their
ancient territories against 'natural resources' companies from the
'advanced' countries. At the beginning of the Cold War, the
United States was the greatest creditor nation the world has ever
known, and now it is the world's greatest debtor. Along with
Canada, the US is technically bankrupt, while its leaders main-
tain enormous defence budgets to fight no serious enemy.

It appears that the tremendous centralizing tendencies of modern
industrial life have degraded many of the more civilizing instincts
of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. Fighting totalitarian states, they have

grown more totalitarian themselves. Since the 1930s, the rise of
prisonership in the USA has been absolutely phenomenal. Pro-
portionally the US now has more people in jail than Tsarist
Russia did in one of its most repressive phases. The US has
more people in jail per capita than Nazi Germany did in 1939,
and that includes concentration camps. 122 This has happened
partly because we have failed to defend freedom of expression.
The crimes against the Germans by the Americans and the
French, and by the British against Mennonites and Russian
prisoners, are only a few of those covered up - think of the
denials, lies, censorship and so on practiced by the French in
Algeria and Indo-China, by the US in Cambodia and Vietnam,
by Canada in Somalia and Vietnam. Soon, according to former
US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, we shall see proof of more
crimes committed by the Allies in and after the Gulf War.

Surely there is something significant in the fact that so many
Second World War fighting men and leaders stayed in power
after 1945, or came to power as a result of wartime fame. They
brought their attitudes with them, and influenced all the politics
of the post-war era. Their names are legion - Truman, Churchill,
De Gaulle, Macmillan, Eden, Eisenhower, Marshall, Smith,
Dulles, Kennedy, Bush. Even as late as 1996, the Republican
Party presidential candidate Bob Dole was renowned for his
heroism in the Second World War.

War is born of propaganda. That is why the first victim of war
is truth. We are still victims of propaganda about the Second
World War.

* * *

CHAPTER 8

History of Forgetting

For most of my life I hardly thought about the flaws in our de-
mocratic system. I thought things were bumping along not too
badly until I encountered the crimes of Eisenhower and De
Gaulle. Even then, I did not imagine that these crimes revealed
anything important about our society today because, after all,
they occurred almost half a century ago, under the tremendous
force of hatred caused by war. It was only when I interviewed
Drew Middleton, a star reporter for the New York Times, that I
began to see how events of long ago were affecting our lives
today. In Middleton's office in New York in 1988,1 told him I
had discovered that the US and French armies had committed
enormous atrocities in Europe in 1945. Because he had written
stories in 1945 denying this following his visits to the prison
camps, I wanted his reaction.

Middleton said, Tm not surprised that you were able to dig up
some bad things from that time.' He then admitted that he had
never visited a prison camp. He did not want to read my
manuscript. What Middleton told me basically was that, yes, he
had lied in 1945 and no, it did not matter to him or the New York
Times if I exposed this.

I was deeply impressed by Middleton's indifference. He didn't
want to read my manuscript, nor did he threaten me with a libel
action, or bring one after the book came out. He was calm in the
face of what I had thought for him would be a disaster. I began
to see then that the New York Times is so powerful it does not
need to threaten people even when it is facing exposure. Middle-
ton's sense of security, his sense of the New York Times' power,
took my breath away. But worse than that, Middleton did not
care about this atrocity. He did not care in 1945; he did not care
in 1988. As we now know, hundreds of thousands of prisoners

had died at the hands of his government in one of the worst
atrocities in Western history, the New York Times witnessed it,
then denied that it had happened. And has gone on denying it
into the 1990s. This seemed to me to be more than a routine
journalistic slip. And to be worth some reflection, in the great
tradition to which the New York Times aspires.

In the opinion of nearly everybody in the West, the Second
World War was a good war. It was necessary to defeat the utter
evil of the dictators. If anyone in the post-war years doubted
this, they were reminded of the pictures of emaciated bodies in
Hitler's death camps.

Lofty were the aims of the Allies, noble were their ideals, elo-
quent the expression of these ideals in such documents as the
Geneva Convention, the Atlantic Charter, and the UN Declara-
tion of Human Rights. All these were in the tradition of the libe-
ral reforms which had succeeded in the West for many years,
yet all these noble declarations were being broken by one branch
of government while they were being written by another. Or, like
the Geneva Convention, they were broken as soon as they
became applicable. People who say anarchy is impractical are
ignoring modern government where anarchy is normal, in the
sense that government is constantly changing course, covering
up, contradicting and reversing itself and doing these things
simultaneously. The Allies clearly did not intend to keep their
word in the 1940s. Why not? And why give it?

The answer to the first question is of course that people often
don't keep their word, because normal human frailties prevail
over the noble resolve to correct them. The more interesting
question is, why make such declarations? For one thing, it is
reassuring to hear them. And probably it is fun to make them.
Think of the well-dressed gentlemen, arriving by limousine in
English castle, French chBteau or American office block with
polished secretaries to sit about a gleaming table making high-
toned statements about lofty purposes until lunch. Surely, to a
kind of mind that is quite common, this is highly important. But
there is another reason, maintained by a delusion prevalent in
the West.

That delusion is that the 'good war 1 led to a good peace: after a
'period of adjustment', Germany was 'put back on her feet' by the
Marshall Plan, so she could become a servant of the West during
the Cold War. She was, however, not to be trusted because she
was still deeply guilty, as she remains today. According to the
delusion, the discovery of the death camps had converted Nazi
war guilt to collective German guilt.

This is not the record. The record shows very clearly that the
Allies were planning a devastating treatment for Germany before
Nazi racist crimes were fully comprehended in the West. The
Allied policy of starving the Germans was in fact decades old -
in 1918- 19, after the First World War, the Allies had maintained
the sea-blockade, causing the deaths of close to a million Ger-
mans. Even the threat of unconditional surrender was not new:
the commander of the American armies in France, General Per-
shing, had advocated imposing unconditional surrender on the
failing Germans on 30 October 1918. 1

One of President Wilson's closest advisers told him at the same
time that 'he would disappoint his own people if he accepted less
than unconditional surrender'. 2 While the death camps were still
mainly a horrifying rumour in the West, in 1943 the Allies were
discussing at Washington and Teheran annexation of the eastern
quarter of Germany, which, as the Allies well knew, would pro-
duce starvation conditions. The Morgenthau Plan was devised
and signed in August- September 1944, long before the full
horror of the camps was visible to reporters and soldiers. But
historians wishing to question the evidence of Allied atrocities
keep citing the camps. Stephen Ambrose has recently written:
'Clearly Eisenhower was appalled by what he saw' at several
camps. 3 He goes on to exculpate Eisenhower for the mass
crimes committed in the American POW camps.

Where the German death camps had most influence was clearly
not in the planning but in the execution of plans. The war crimi-
nals would be tried regardless of what horrors were actually un-
covered in the camps. But the possibility of mitigation of Allied
war hatred resulting from the work of leaders who actually prac-
ticed the noble ideals - Herbert Hoover, Victor Gollancz, the
Bishop of Chichester, Norman Robertson, Rabbi Baeck, Robert

Patterson - was postponed by the astounded revulsion felt
throughout the West - and in Germany - against the slaughter
in Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau and Auschwitz. This revulsion
turned into the sense of collective German guilt, which is still
very powerful today. As late as 1996, a book by Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen accusing Germans of total collective guilt for war
crimes was causing a sensation throughout Western countries. 4

Certainly Germans en masse were collectively guilty for some
Nazi crimes because they gave Hitler a plurality of votes in the
last election before he became Chancellor. They were collec-
tively guilty of vicious crimes of aggression against countries
who had given them no casus belli, such as Czechoslovakia,
Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia,
Greece and the Soviet Union. How many Germans were guilty
of racist crimes is in dispute, but one thing is for sure: as a people
represented by their national government, they have collectively
accepted this guilt, and this is recognized throughout Germany
and the world. They have paid enormous compensation to the
victims, offered humble apologies to the survivors, condemned
the crimes in many books, films, ceremonies and monuments.

This sense of collective German guilt is useful in a specially
morbid way to her former enemies because it effectively seals off
all discussions about the mistreatment of Germans in 1945. Time
and again, when anyone reproaches the Allies for their treatment
of German women and children in 1945, the reply is heard, 'But
look what the Germans did. 1 This is a common refrain today in
Germany itself. But for much of the war and a long time after, it
was actually forbidden in the American press to mention the
German resistance. President Roosevelt forbade the press to print
news of the German resistance, a directive that was enforced
even after the war by the American occupation authorities. 5

Guilt pervades Germany like a religion. It is the 'Canossa
Republic 1 , penitent in pain before its judges.* Guilt is so power-
ful that it has caused the Canossa Republic repeatedly to deny
any intention of reclaiming sovereignty over the eastern lands,
although it is a well-established UN principle that no government
has the right to waive the claims of individuals to their property.
Nor may it impede their right of return to their former homeland.

There was wisdom in this renunciation, because the decline of
nationalism in Europe has meant the opening of borders to trade,
travel, culture and friendship. But that decline of nationalism, like
the renunciation, affects the Canossa Republic more than anyone
else. Poles and Czechs make it difficult or impossible for individu-
al Germans to buy back their ancient lands. Even Vaclav Havel,
willing to apologize for Czech crimes, cannot contemplate repara-
tions or restoration of stolen property. The Canossa Republic leads
the way, but it is hard to discern anyone following it on the path
of reconciliation.

* At Canossa in 1 077, King Henry IV knelt in the snow for three
days as he begged Pope Gregory to release him from excommuni-
cation. The phrase was first used by Paul Boytinck in conversation
with the author in 1995.

It is especially shocking that for many decades the Canossa
Republic has failed to ensure historical recognition of the
expellees' suffering, as if to prevent future generations from
knowing anything at all about the true history of their forebears
and their country. It is true that for a few years, under Adenauer
and soon after, the West German government helped with the
publication of documents on the expulsion, but for many years
now German schoolchildren have been taught little or nothing
of their ancestors' tragic sufferings after the war.

The Allies' war aims, which included the right of self-determi-
nation for all peoples, apparently guaranteed the homelands of
the eastern Germans. But all the Allies actually did was to
include a phrase in Article XIII of the Potsdam Protocol stipula-
ting that the 'population transfers' should occur under 'humane
and orderly conditions'. As the phrase was being typed into the
Potsdam agreement, its nauseating hypocrisy was visible to all:
millions of miserable, dying expellees were crowding into the
remainder of Germany, but the Western Allies were actually
preventing help from reaching them. As we have seen, the ICRC,
the Quakers, the Mennonites, the Lutherans and many others
were not allowed to operate in Germany until many months later.
In a memorable phrase, Conor Cruise O'Brien described this sort

of thing as a slick coating of the hypocrisy and cultivated inat-
tention' that our leaders apply to reduce the friction between our
admirable principles and our self-interest. The quote is worth ex-
panding: The traditional [Western] ethic will require larger and
larger doses of its traditional built-in antidotes - the forces of hy-
pocrisy and cultivated inattention combined with a certain mini-
mum of alms.' 6

Robert Murphy protested eloquently in a Memorandum to the
State Department in October 1945, months after Potsdam: 'In the
Lehrter Railroad station in Berlin alone our medical authorities
state an average of ten have been dying daily from exhaustion,
malnutrition and illness. In viewing the distress and despair of
these wretches, in smelling the odor of their filthy condition, the
mind reverts instantly to Dachau and Buchenwald. Here is retri-
bution on a large scale, practiced not on the Parteibonzen [party
big-wigs], but on women and children, the poor, the infirm . . .'
7 Article XIII made no difference at all, other than to history.
But history is not idle - in other words, the expellees will not go
away. On 26 August 1994, the UN Sub-Commission on Human
Rights adopted Resolution 1994/24 re-affirming 'the right of
refugees and displaced persons to return in safety and dignity to
their country of origin and/or within it, to their place of origin or
choice . . .' The language plainly covers the rights of the dispos-
sessed Germans.

Nevertheless, in agreement with the Allies in 1990, the Canossa
Republic recognized the Oder-Neisse frontier, as part of the final
settlement to free Germany of the Allied presence. In the words
of Alfred de Zayas, the German government 'yielded to interna-
tional pressure and relinquished its legal claims to the centuries-
old homeland. These were claims that for decades after the war
had been reaffirmed both inside Germany, and to the rest of the
world. But that was the old German generation speaking, through
earlier governments that still felt morally obliged to the expelled
and the dispossessed. Forty years of re-education have resulted
in a different perspective. Renunciation was to be expected.
Today, the West either ignores the historical record, or accepts
the euphemisms about the expulsions propounded by Polish and
German apologists.' 8

This 1990 agreement itself may have been illegal, or ultra vires,
since it is clear from many UN resolutions that a crime or abro-
gation of rights is not made legal even if approved or committed
by a government against its own citizens. Such arguments might
be seen as 'only legalistic 1 , but the creation of the Israeli state
and the modern North American aboriginal land claims were at
the beginning more dejure than de facto.

When the state of Israel was founded in 1947, all of the Jewish
occupants under the Romans had been dead for almost two
thousand years. In North America, not a single Iroquois, Chia-
pas, Sioux or Crae is left alive of those who were the defeated
or defrauded original occupants. Is it legal and just for the
German government to banish the claims of living citizens
who had been expelled and despoiled? And to do this without
even trying to obtain compensation or recognition? Germany in
its guilt and poverty found it possible to make apologies and to
pay billions of dollars in reparations to the Allies, plus a hundred
billion Deutschmarks in restitutions to victims of Nazi atrocities,
as well as giving up all claim to some 25% of their national
territory, not to mention all the personal goods, land title, facto-
ries, schools, houses, farms and so on pertaining to those lands.
Millions of German victims of Potsdam have made enormous
reparations and humble apologies. They have all been deprived
of their human rights, of the right to be judged as individuals,
of their right to dignity and equality, of their private land and
personal possessions.

As it was in the beginning in 1945, so it was at the end in 1990,
our governments and their clients dealt away rights that normally
we expect them to uphold. Hardly anyone in the Western demo-
cracies even noticed what was being done. Here was German
guilt sealing off discussion of the issues of the expellees and
other Allied crimes. The only government that could protect their
rights signed them away.

We see today great institutions of public opinion - among them
Le Monde and the New York Times - feverishly denying the
Western Allied atrocities of the post-war period against Germany.
For most people in the West, the denials rest on delusion, not
evidence. The question never even becomes, 'Did the Allies do

such things? 1 because the answer has been planted in everyone's
heads already. 'No, the Allies did not, because they could not.'
For instance, the eminent British historian Michael Howard,
reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement a book about Allied
atrocities against Germans, admitted that although he was 'an
innumerate historian' unqualified to judge the crucial statistics in
the book, he could 'apply the criterion of inherent probability' to
refute the book. 9 The French press and TV rose with rhetoric
uncomplicated by evidence to denounce recent allegations that
mass crimes were committed by the French army against the
Germans. Stephen Ambrose also attacked a book about allied
misdeeds by concluding that 'when scholars do the necessary
research they will find [this book] to be worse than worthless'. 10
The answer is known before the evidence is consulted. In other
words, belief is everything, evidence means nothing.

Count Nikolai Tolstoy, the renowned English writer, has been
driven bankrupt and forbidden to publish on the subject of
British treatment of prisoners of war under Lord Aldington. His
books have been withdrawn from British libraries. His attempts
at redress in British courts have been constantly frustrated in the
UK, although the denial of his rights has been condemned by the
European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg. The alleged
libel against Lord Aldington was converted by the courts and
government into a libel against the history of the state. Against
which there is no appeal.

The books of former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark have
revealed tremendous civilian deaths in Iraq during the Gulf
War which have never been admitted by any of the Allies who
caused them. JJ_ No major publisher in the English-speaking
world has dared to bring them out.

My fellow author Alfred de Zayas, a graduate of Harvard and of
Guttingen, spent years researching and writing his book Nemesis
at Potsdam, about the expulsions from the east of Germany. And
then he had to spend ten years sending it round to almost a hun-
dred publishers in the West before the manuscript was finally ac-
cepted. The president of one of the biggest houses in New York
returned the manuscript with the note that he would never publish
a book sympathetic to the Germans.

It is no good to respond that all these authors got published,
and so freedom of discussion exists. The full weight of official
disapproval has stifled the discussion by shrinking the audience.
And once that happens the authors may be silenced by financial
distress.

There is an astonishing contrast right now between Russia and
the West. We condemned them for many decades precisely
because they denied democracy and suppressed discussion.
Now, they have demolished suppression, opened their archives,
and published the truth about their crimes. They have even
admitted that some allegations of German crimes were never
true. Public discourse is free and informed on all those topics.
And we say, 'Good for you, democracy now has a chance with
you.' But in the West, the archives are very often managed in
order to present a view of history acceptable to the established
authority. Photographs and documents of Allied atrocities have
'disappeared' from archives, and this goes on to the present day.
'In my thirty years as a scholar of American history,' said one
American professor, 'I have never known the archives to appear
to be so much of a political agency of the executive branch as it
is now. One used to think of the Archivist of the United States as
a professional scholar. Now he has become someone who fills a
political bill.' j_2 Many people who have cast doubt on German
crimes have been fired from their jobs, vilified, deported, jailed
or censored, while anyone who denies our post-war crimes
against the Germans is published and praised by press, aca-
deme, army and government.

Freedom is diminished when discussion is suppressed, dissi-
dents are jailed, when in fact history is genetically altered, as
Stalin showed every time he hid public documents or altered
history in the books. If we are to regain the freedoms that we
fought for in the war, the official sanctioning against authors
must stop, the arrogant abuse of public trust in the archives must
end, and full disclosure prevail.

Democracy is generally believed to be the best government
because it expresses the public opinion that is normally free,
wise and kind. If this were not so, who would defend demo-

cracy? If the general belief were that public opinion were
normally slavish, stupid and cruel, no one would think demo-
cracy was worth defending. And without that faith, democracy
dies. Hitler's brilliant propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels said of
the German people, 'You can't change the masses. They will
always be the same: dumb, gluttonous and forgetful.' Contemp-
tuous of their forgetfulness, he said anything he liked because
he believed they were always unaware of what he had said be-
fore. 13 We shudder to think that Goebbels' observation might
be even slightly true in the Western democracies; on the other
hand, our pleasing assumption about democratic public opinion
has never been tested.

Public opinion can be discerned but dimly, in primitive jousts
such as elections, in raffirendums or in the tiny samplings pas-
sing grandly as public opinion polls. None of these has ever
tested us for our freedom, wisdom or kindness. The goodness
of public opinion is by and large an article of faith.

But it is a faith that was justified in 1946. Herbert Hoover made
many public appeals by radio to the decency, compassion and
common sense of the American and Canadian people and was
never disappointed. Can anyone in his right mind imagine Henry
Morgenthau going on radio with a forthright appeal to the vici-
ousness, vengefulness and hatred of the American people?

To do their good deeds in the post-war period, men like Marshall
and Hoover, Gollancz and Mackenzie King walked in the open,
but their opposites like Morgenthau, Buisson and Eisenhower had
to operate under camouflage. Surely this can only be because the
widely-based institutions of Western democracy - parliament,
literate education, a free press, the rule of law - foster the normal
human sympathies that make mass crimes abhorrent. This is why
freedom of discussion in democracy is so important; it is a con-
stant corrective to the cruel tendencies in people. Without free-
dom of discussion, democracy first grows arrogant, then brutal.
And the discussion of Allied war crimes has been circumscribed
by lies, propaganda and suppression for fifty years.

On no subject is the Western cover-up more profound and tragic
than the refusal of Western public opinion-makers to incorporate

the fate of the German expellees into the history of the Second
World War and its consequences. This of course effectively
denies redress not just to the German state, but especially to the
millions of robbed and maimed individuals who are still alive.
The cover-up is definitely part of that series of misdeeds which
Adenauer condemned roundly in 1949, and which continue to
haunt 'the uneasy conscience of the West 1 . Speaking to the Swiss
Parliament in Bern, Switzerland, in March 1949, Adenauer com-
pared the expulsions to the misdeeds of the Nazis, and conclu-
ded, 'The expulsions resulted from the Potsdam Agreement of
2 August 1945. I am convinced that one day world history will
pronounce a very harsh verdict on this document.' 14

History of forgetting

For a long time it puzzled me that we scarcely honour those who
implemented our noblest ideals after the Second World War. As
nations, we showed wonderful generosity and great skill. But
memory of this has almost disappeared, except in the minds of a
few survivors, and even they do not usually remember much.

Mackenzie King's kindly assistant Norman Robertson was right
about the brief life of gratitude: I interviewed two Polish generals
in Moscow in 1993, and asked them what they remembered
about Hoover. They said he was a great policeman - they meant
J. Edgar Hoover, of the FBI. Yet their lives had been saved by
Hoover food when they were young in 1946, and probably their
fathers' lives before them, during Hoover's relief campaigns in
1919-21.

The post-war era was not the only time that the Western demo-
cracies have aided the unfortunate in far parts of the world. While
doing the research for this book, I visited a friend who lived near
a village called Durham, in Ontario, where I encountered one of
those humble books that are sold even in hardware stores because
they are local history by a local author. This was a history of
Durham County. I normally buy such books, because there is
usually something interesting in them, so I took it back to the
farmhouse where we were staying, intending to present it to my
hostess, and then to skim through it. In the book, I read of the
sermon given by a local Protestant minister in about 1890,

appealing for funds to help the starving people of a province in
British India.

Durham at that time was many days by sea from London, plus
several days by train via Toronto. India was almost beyond
imagining to the pioneer farmers of Durham. We can be sure that
not one of them had the least intention of going there. Nobody in
Durham knew any Indians. Why then did anyone appeal to them?
In this remote part of the Empire there were white human beings
giving help to distant brown people to whom they had no connec-
tion except human sympathy. Sympathy, and a common bond of
Empire. They gave - and all of this has disappeared from history.
Except in Durham.

Similarly, the French today remember the race crimes of the
Vichy government, and pay no attention to the heroic sacrifices
of millions of French people as they saved scores of thousands
of Jewish refugees from Nazi death camps. 15

Why do we not remember the heroes of love as well as the
heroes of hate? Partly because we love heroes, and heroics itself
has come to mean bravery in battle. Still, it is puzzling that those
who crowned world-wide defeat of the Axis with the world-wide
victory of compassion, who validated our war by carrying out
our wartime aims, are not honoured like wartime heroes. Hoover
estimated that the food relief campaign after the war saved
800,000,000 lives. Even if he over-estimated by ten times -
impossible for this extremely intelligent and informed man - that
is many millions more lives saved from immediate death than
were lost to untimely death. In that post-war campaign, peoples
who had been divided were reunited, ideals for which millions
died in war were finally implemented, making the victory not
just a triumph of arms but the coronation of civilization. Without
the work of millions of people after the war, the victory itself
would have been turned into a gross and tragic failure. Yet as we
can see by a computer check in one of the world's great libraries
[The Robarts Library, University of Toronto] roughly 850 books
about Hitler have been published in English, but only 80 about
Hoover. Killer Hitler outsells saviour Hoover ten to one in the
West.

I have thought about this for years, trying to find the answer
to this question, and it has always evaded me. I thought I was
going to have to finish this book without even suggesting an
answer. The reason I could not understand was simple: I was a
young and therefore idealistic person during the Second World
War. I saw my brothers and sister and father go off to fight the
Hun for great reasons. They were defending democracy, Canada,
the British Empire, self-determination and fair treatment for all
peoples. We were the just of the world, arrayed in a death
struggle against the cruel barbarian.

For many years, until I began to study the post-war period, I
really believed that these were the reasons we fought Hitler.
Therefore I took it for granted that we were forgetting our most
important ideals when we neglected the heroes who had enacted
them. Now at last I think I understand: the reason for our forget-
fulness is not that we forget the ideals that we value. The ideals
that we remember are those we value. But they are not the
ideals I thought - democracy, self-determination for all peoples,
and so on. No, the ones we remember are the ones we do believe
in - victory, strong leadership, courage, hard labour in the
common cause, self-sacrifice for the common good, and so on.
What we remember is what we value. The rest is a noble sham.

But not quite.

After all, if we had not believed the noble ideals, we would not
have fed the starving after the Second World War, would not
have helped Europe. We do believe in them, but not much. Our
leaders tell us we believe in these things to mask in lovely high-
mindedness our pursuit of our normal self-interest. Where there
is no evidence demonstrating our high-mindedness, we may
make it look better by contrasting it with the crimes of others.
The world does not lack for dreadful criminals - the Japanese
under the Empire, the Soviets, the Iraqis. And of course the
Germans.

And we accept all this with shy eyes, because our leaders are
encouraging us in the happiest of human pursuits, creating a
good opinion of ourselves.

We have still to learn that our ideals will inspire no one if they
do not inspire us. Nobody pays any attention to a teacher who
has not learned his own lesson.

The struggle between crimes and mercies is not won, or lost,
or over. As Solzhenitsyn said of the Russian guards round the
Gulag - inside each one of us sits the soldier with his eye on the
good woman, and his finger on the trigger.

Ad finem.

* * *

APPENDICES

1 : The Death Rate and the Totals

NOTE: The double percentage point sign at the end of a number,
e.g. 23.5%%, indicates per thousand, not per hundred.

We can establish the death rate used by Robert Murphy for
1946 in Germany starting with several well-known facts: that
emigration was forbidden at the time, and that immigration was
compelled, in the form of expellees and prisoners arriving. But
Murphy anticipated that the population of Germany would
decline by two million despite immigration and births. His pre-
diction means that in a period of two to four years, German
deaths would outnumber births by two million.

As we have seen, the official death rates for Germany have
been falsified, but Murphy's statistics make it easy to determine
the true rate. We begin with the birth rate since this rate does not
directly reveal statistics that, like deaths, are dangerous in them-
selves, so we can be fairly sure that it was reported reliably.
The rate for west Germany was 16.1%% in 1946, and for east
Germany it was 10.4%%. 1 Pro-rating for population size, we see
that the overall German average was therefore 14.47%%. Thus
there were born each year in Germany around 940,000 people.
For Murphy's prediction to have come true in one year, the
deaths would have had to have been 2,000,000 plus 940,000
equals 2,940,000, producing a rate of 45%%. For two years, the
rate would have had to have been 29.8%%, for three years
24%>%), for four years 22%%, and so on. It is clear that no one
participating in the 1947 CFM meetings thought that it would

take more than four years to bring back all the expellees and
prisoners, so we will stop the calculations there.

It is clear that the death rate when Murphy was writing was
between 22%% and 45%%. We have found no evidence any-
where that a death rate as high as 45%% had ever prevailed for
long in a major part of Germany, except for Konigsberg for a
few months in 1945- 46. The highest rate we have found was the
city of Berlin at around 41%%. Furthermore, to have used such a
high rate, Murphy must have thought that all the expellees and
prisoners would be home in one year, i.e. by 1948, which was
clearly not the case, if only because the French and Russians, the
major holders of POWs in 1947, said they had no intention of
returning all their prisoners that year. Since that high rate of
45%>%) is nearly impossible, we should give great weight to the
fact that the Soviets, British and French all said that they would
return their prisoners by 1949. And nearly all were returned.

We should also give great weight to the fact that the rate of
inflow of expellees when Murphy was writing in 1947 meant
that nearly all of them would be in Germany by 1950. And the
Allies expected the situation in Germany to stabilize sufficiently
by 1950 so that a further small flow of expellees would have no
material effect on the economy. And this is what happened.

The rate consistent with the virtual completion of immigration
in 1950 is certainly the most likely. That rate is 24%%. It lies
to the conservative side [i.e. implying the fewest deaths] of the
range from 22%% to 29.8%%.

Since we know from comparing the censusses that Murphy's
prediction was actually cautious in the sense of predicting fewer
deaths than did occur, it is reasonable to conclude that he was
cautious in selecting his time frame to determine the death rate,
i.e., it is reasonable to assume that his death rate was on the
cautious side of the 20-30%)%) range. That also is consistent with
the death rate of 24%%.

That is the death rate used as a benchmark to check the results
of the census calculations.

Totals

Returned

333,525

333,525

1,131,000

1,000,000

657,000

600,000

510,000

510,000

2,631,525

2,443,525

Analysis of additions to population,
October 1946-September 1950

Prisoners of War

American
Soviet
French
British

Prisoners in other countries

(e.g. Yugoslavia, Poland) 235,000 200,000

Total Prisoners 2,643,525

Total Expellees 6,000,000

Total Arrivals (rounded) 8,600,000

SOURCES: American - according to the Office of the Chief Historian,
European Command, Frankfurt, 1947; in the Center for Military His-
tory, Washington. Also Patterson Papers, LC. Both courtesy of Dr Er-
nest F. Fisher, Arlington. Soviet - according to Maschke, Bulanov Re-
port and Soviet delegate to CFM, 1947. Allow deaths and holdbacks of
131,000. French - according to Buisson, Appendix 4. Less deaths esti-
mated by author of 57,000. British - according to UK delegate to
CFM, 1947. 2 Yugoslavia, etc. - according to Maschke, Vol. XV, p.
296. Allow for deaths and holdbacks of 35,000.

2 : Other Deaths Among Germans

Beyond the deaths totalled in the text, there were certainly other
deaths among the Germans after May 1945. Those who died
included some prisoners who had not been covered in the
Adenauer-Bitter survey that showed 1.4 million missing soldiers,
paramilitary personnel and civilians. Also, there were probably
more than the reported 2.1 million deaths among the expellees.
And there were many Germans who died in Germany during the
first year and a half of Allied occupation, from spring 1945 to
October 1946.

Estimated deaths among German civilians,
May 1945-October 1946

The Murphy estimate of two million deaths to come soon after
1947 is based on his knowledge of 'the present high death rate in
Germany 1 . Murphy knew the death rate for a considerable period
leading up to October 1946. This rate was 24 per thousand per
year.

The conclusion from this death rate is simple: at the very
minimum, about 1,900,000 persons of the c. 65 million German
population in the Occupied Zones died in the period August
1945-October 1946. 3 But the official West German figures for
deaths in the three western zones was 786,000. 4 No comparable
statistical summaries have been published for the Soviet zone
but conditions there, e.g. rations, were not greatly different from
those in the west. The Soviet zone had about 39% of the popula-
tion of the western zones, so the estimate of deaths there is about
306,000. Thus, in the period August 1945-October 1946, when
the death rate of 24%% derived from Murphy's figures shows that
the death toll must have been around 1,900,000, the official
reports show only about 1,092,000. Once again, many people are
probably missing/not accounted for. If Murphy was correct in
these figures which were never disputed by any of the occupying
powers, then between August 1945 and October 1946 about
800,000 Germans died but were not reported dead in the Allied
statistics.

As we have seen, hundreds of thousands of other Europeans died
in the camps. The Soviets alone reported the deaths of some
160,000.

The figure of 1.4 million missing was based by the Adenauer
government on research work done by the Committee on pri-
soner of war questions {Ausschufi fur Kriegsgefangenenfragen)
headed by Dr Margarethe Bitter of Munich in the late 1940s. Dr
Bitter told the author in 1991 that her survey covered some 94%
of all families in the three western zones, plus about 30% of the
19 million people in the Soviet zone. Rudiger Overmans has
written that no one from the Soviet zone responded. Both agree

that no one was surveyed in the seized territories, where at least
1 million and perhaps as many as 4.5 million Germans avoided
expulsion. An unknown number of prisoners is therefore missing
from those families.

The survey when completed pro rata should show between 1.7
and 1.9 million missing. The author has taken the lower figure as
sufficient for his purpose.

3 : The Fate of the Expellees

note: This is a point-form summary of the evidence concerning deaths
of Germans, mainly expellees, from August 1945 to October 1946,
some of it from documents newly declassified in the US.

1) The French delegate at the Council of Foreign Ministers in
April 1947 said that 4.5 million expellees had arrived (as at
October 1946) and that 2 million were expected to come in the
near future. 5

2) US Senator Homer E. Capehart said in the US Senate on

5 February 1946 that already 3 million expellees were Missing/
Not Accounted For. 6

3) The members of the Committee Against Mass Expulsions in
New York said that on the basis of the 1946 census, around 4.8
million expellees were Missing/Not Accounted For. This was
published in their book The Land of the Dead, with an Introduc-
tion signed by nineteen prominent Americans, among them

H. V. Kaltenborn, Dorothy Thompson and John Dewey. They
estimated that 4.8 million had died by the end of 1947. (Infant
mortality in Brandenburg province was estimated at 80-90% in
autumn 1945. Infant mortality throughout Germany for the year
to the spring of 1946 was reported to Hoover to be 30%. 7

The Catholic bishops of the United States, meeting in Washington
on 16 November 1946, said that, 'We boast of our democracy,
but in this transplantation of peoples we have perhaps unwittingly
allowed ourselves to be influenced by the herd theory of heartless
totalitarian political philosophy. 1 8 The Catholic bishops were on

strong ground, for accusations of this same crime of deportation
of peoples had been levelled by the Allies themselves against the
Nazis at Nuremberg. Count Three of Section J of the Indictment
against Goring, Ribbentrop and others, reads: Tn certain occupied
territories purportedly annexed to Germany, the defendants
methodically and pursuant to plan endeavored to assimilate those
territories politically, culturally, socially and economically into
the German Reich, and the defendants endeavored to obliterate
the former national character of these territories . . .' The CAME
authors added, 'It is inconceivable that the United States
government would endorse policies for which the Nazi leaders
were tried and hanged under American auspices.' Yet that is
what happened. 9

4) Finally, for the Polish-administered areas of (former)
Germany: the Soviet delegate said at the Council of Foreign
Ministers meeting in April 1947 that 5.7 million expellees had
(probably as of October 1946) left Polish-administered areas
since Potsdam, and 400,000 remained behind. This is amply
confirmed by the report of the Canadian Legation in Warsaw at
25 January 1949. The Canadians were told by the Poles that as
of June 1947, only 289,000 ethnic Germans remained in the
former German territories taken over by Poland. 10

Murphy said that there had been originally 7 million potential
expellees there, which would mean that the Missing/Not
Accounted For were 0.9 million from 7 million in two years.
Pro-rating to all of the 14/15 million refugees, we see a total of
Missing/Not Accounted For of over 2 million from July 1945 to
October 1946. Many millions were still left to endure the hard-
ships of the trek after that. U_

4 : How One Writer was Spied on

Following the publication of Other Losses in 1989, as I travelled
for further research and for publicity, I slowly realized that I was
being spied on, presumably by Canadian, American, British,
French and Russian agencies hostile to the disclosures in the
book.

In the autumn of 1989, my wife Elisabeth and I were staying
in the villa of friends in the south of France. The phone was
making strange sounds, so that it was difficult to hear. I called
the telephone company, and they said they would send a repair-
man. The following day, as Elisabeth and I were leaving the
house, we noticed that a man in a suit with a briefcase was
standing in the driveway. I asked him what he wanted and he
said he was looking for the Villa Autran. I said that it was the
villa he had just seen us leaving, that we were the occupants,
and asked him if he had come about the phone. He said yes, and
I told him the villa was open and he could go in and fix it while
we were out. That night, the phone worked fine.

The next day, I saw a blue and yellow phone company truck in
the road just past the driveway, and a man in uniform with tools
hanging from his belt. Suddenly I remembered the incident from
the day before, so I asked the uniformed man if he was the
regular repairman for the area. He said yes, except when he was
on holiday and someone else took over. I asked if he had been
told to fix my phone and he said no. Then I remembered that
there had been no telephone company truck in or near the
driveway the day before.

Elisabeth and I talked it over and could not make it out. I saw
no point in calling the phone company because they could say
only that they knew nothing about it.

A few days later I was on the phone - the same phone - to my
publisher in Toronto, Nelson Doucet. I told him about a disco-
very I had recently made about the prisoners, and my opinion
of it. I also told him this was secret.

A few days after that, I was talking by phone - again, the same
phone - to a British journalist who told me, 'But you think . . .'
and went on to repeat what I had told Doucet. I was dumb-
founded. How had he known that? Elisabeth and I discussed it
and I said the place was bugged, but she pooh-poohed the idea.
I could hardly believe it myself. For that to be true, I thought, the
French would have to know about my book, which had not even
been published in France. Then they would have had to realize I

was in France, and then track me down. And the villa we were in
was not rented - it was borrowed, and the phone was in the name
of the owners. To the French police, I believed, I was just a
tourist who had been there many times before, and represented
no danger. Why then would someone bug my phone, and keep
recording all the calls - always in English - and analyze them?
Above all, why phone the British journalist and tell him? This
was the most preposterous thing of all. But then, how did he
know what I had told Doucet in confidence? Did he guess? Did
someone phone him? Did Doucet blab? But Doucet is a discreet,
loyal and courageous publisher. I could not imagine him doing
such a thing. The whole affair seemed so bizarre that I simply
had to dismiss it. So I did nothing about it for five years.

Then, in 1994,1 met a man I shall call Jean le Spy, who had
been a very senior officer in a big security organization in a
Western democracy. He knew about me. He said that after the
publication of my book Other Losses in September 1989, 'You
were targeted right away.' Le Spy knew what he was talking
about because he had been in one of the agencies that had done
the spying. I told Le Spy the story about me and Nelson Doucet.
He explained how it was done. He said that the Americans were
'on to you as soon as you published'. He told me that as soon as I
had arrived in Paris, the French police, who had been warned by
the Americans, entered my hotel room and copied or read what
they wanted and bugged the room. From then on it was easy to
trace me in France.

He then explained the phone calls. The Americans routinely
listen to all the international calls that interest them. They tape-
record these calls, which are listened to by computers which are
able to recognize key words. The computers are so sophisticated
now, he said, that they have syntax built in. They notice the use
of a word such as, say, 'Burns', which may be a name or a verb,
and they can distinguish between 'fall' as a verb and 'fall' as a
season. If a phone call contains the key word or clusters of key
words that interest them, the tape is turned over to a human being
for analysis. The Canadians do the same thing. The French do the
same thing. The British, Norwegians and others do the same thing.
Since the Americans and Canadians (and presumably the others)
are forbidden by their laws to bug their own citizens without a

court order, they must either get that order, listen illegally, or not
listen at all.

Not to listen is, for these spies, inconceivable. So, Le Spy said,
the Americans listen to Canadian calls, and the Canadians to
American calls, all the time. The Canadians then offer the Ame-
ricans everything they have and vice versa. Technically, no law
is broken. And this is so routine now that the word Le Spy used
to describe it is that 'they publish this 1 , meaning they exchange it
regularly in an organized and prearranged manner, but, of
course, always within narrow and secret limits.

This capacity naturally applies to all information that is trans-
ferred digitally or by satellite, such as bank transfers, faxes,
Email on the Internet, TV signals - anything. So far as I know,
this has never been made public before. So far as I can judge, it
is against the law.

In my case, the line of communication is easy to see. The
computers downloaded my Doucet call to tape, flagged it and
passed it to an expert, who then informed the various American,
Canadian, French, German and British writers, State Department
employees, academics, print and TV journalists and army officers
who were busy rebutting my charges.

This is only one of many bizarre incidents. My mail has been
opened, and the contents removed. At Heathrow, my hand-
luggage was taken from me by an official of British Airways as I
was boarding a flight to Moscow. When I pointed out that I had
been promised by BA in Toronto that I could take the luggage,
by hand, and that in fact I had just arrived from Toronto with the
luggage under the seat, the official quickly said, 'If you want to
get on this flight, check the bags.' I checked them. When I
arrived in Moscow, my Russian collaborator and researcher
Alexei Kirichenko told me that he had been warned by a former
KGB officer that a CIA man in Washington had just phoned him
to say, 'Tell Kirichenko not to work with Bacque, as he is a very
dangerous man.' Reassured, I worked with Kirichenko anyway.
I invited him to stay at my house in Toronto to collaborate on a
project. He arrived with no typewriter and no notes and nothing
done. When I saw the childish scribbling he had done for a draft

of a section in our projected book, I said, 'Alexei, this is no good
at all. You told me you had written five books.' He admitted then
he had written none. One day just before his departure, I was out
of the house, leaving him there. When I returned to my study, I
could smell his strong body odour in the room. This was odd, as
it was clear to both of us that there was no book to work on. The
next day, after he left, I received a call from a Toronto lawyer
warning me that Alexei had evidence that I was planning to steal
his work from him.

The next time I used my copying machine, I discovered it was
out of paper, though it had been loaded when Alexei was there.
Clearly, he had been using a lot of copy paper while I was out.
The lawyer then phoned Saturday Night magazine to warn them
that I was planning to steal Kirichenko's work. They also
phoned my book publishers, Stoddart/General. Later on, the
incoming editor of Saturday Night, Ken Whyte, refused to pub-
lish an excerpt from my new book, even though it proved by my
research in the KGB archives in Moscow that my earlier work
for Saturday Night had been absolutely correct. He did this
despite the fact that John Fraser, his predecessor, had paid my
way to Moscow and back to do that research, thereby acquiring
exclusive rights to the work. Whyte then published an attack on
me by a British journalist, and refused to print even a mild letter
from me rebutting the incorrect criticism by the journalist.

Work commissioned from me by the Globe and Mail, the Times
Literary Supplement and the Ottawa Citizen has been refused.
My letters to the editor have been refused by such papers as Le
Monde, the New York Times, the Toronto Star, the Globe and
Mail, and Saturday Night under Ken Whyte. Although my pre-
vious book was an international best-seller, the manuscript of
Crimes and Mercies was turned down by fifteen different publi-
shers. And let us remember that this has nothing to do with the
quality of my writing, or of my research, or of any anticipated
financial loss.

Are these rejections a conspiracy? Or did fear outweigh greed
in editorial offices throughout the West? Or was it a sudden
attack of editorial likemindedness? Whatever, for three years I
suffered the censorship by rejection slip of the proscribed writer.

There is no freedom of the press in the West, only freedom to
own the press.

When I said to Le Spy, Why would they go to all this trouble over
a book of history?' He said, 'They wanted to know who you were
working for. Especially when you went to Moscow.' I said, 'It's
obvious who I work for. I work for my readers.' He just laughed.

5 : Local Death Rates in Germany, 1946-50

Most of the reports show a high death rate. Few of the towns
reporting give complete statistics. Most of the towns that report
death rates near or below the 12.1%% rate reported for 1947 by
the Statistisches Bundesamt also display characteristics that
demonstrate their unreliability, e.g. Karlsruhe and Bonn.

Death statistics for one Austrian and nine German cities and
towns for certain critical years appear below. Four were issued by
the authorities in the places concerned, the rest by other authori-
ties and observers as listed. Those that accord with the general
death rates calculated in Chapter V are in Table A. Those in
conflict appear in Table B with the author's comments.

• Comments on Table A (below):

Brilon: City officials in 1995 were asked by the author for death statis-
tics of their city for 1945- 49, and replied that they were understaffed
and could not fulfil the request. The author, during research in Ottawa,
came upon a copy of a three-page report made by the official of the
City of Brilon in 1946, and given to the Canadian Military Governor.
This shows the death rate reported above. A copy was sent to Brilon.

Landau: 1946 population averaged from (January 1946) 19,370 and
(October 1946) 20,450. 1947 population averaged from (1946) 19,910
and (1948) 21,694. All statistics from Landau Town Archives, Landau,
Rheinland-Pfalz.

Berlin: Among the 3 million people of Berlin the death rate in May of
1946 was three times the pre-war rate, i.e. around 37%%. In 1947,
according to Chancellor Adenauer, it was around 29%%. (Adenauer,
Speech to Swiss Parliamentary Chamber, March 1949, and Ernst-Giin-
ther Schenck, Das Menschliche Elend im 20. Jahrhundert. Eine Patho-
graphie der Kriegs-, Hunger- und politischen Katastrophen Europas,

p. 68.) In Kimigsberg, taken over by the Soviets, over 70% of the
population died in two years (ibid., p. 79). 12 Cannibalism was reported
to have occurred among some of them. Similar conditions prevailed in
other areas of East Prussia, West Prussia, near Frankfurt-am-der-Oder
and in many Silesian towns, according to Dr Schenck.

Marktoberdorf. Complete statistics for this small town near Augsburg
are available from the Bayerische Statistisches Landesamt and from
the Statistical Service in the Rathaus of Marktoberdorf. Average for
five years equals 24.2%%.

Augsburg: The Augsburg city archives do not have any figures for 1946,
and statistics for only three months of 1947 and three months of 1948,
and again none for 1949 and 1950.

Place

TABLE A

Year Population Deaths Death rate

Bad Kreuznach

1946

26,096

1,010

38.7%%

(French zone)

1947

27,233

743

27.3%%

1948

26,768

637

23.8%%

1949

27,000 (ca)

569

21.1%%

Berlin

1945-

46

2,600,000

46.2%%

1947

3,000,000

28.5 - 29.0%%

Brilon

1945-

46

71,110

2,224

31.3%%

Konigsberg

1945-

47

100,000

75,000

750.0%%

Landau

1946

19,910

787

39.5%%

(French zone)

1947

20,802

563

27.0%%

1948

21,694

513

23.6%%

1949

22,426

462

20.6%%

1950

23,188

485

20.9%%

Marktoberdorf

1946

4,318

119

27.6%%

(US zone)

1947

4,557

112

24.6%%

1948

4,648

80

17.2%%

1949

4,913

121

24.6%%

1950

5,085

138

27.1%%

Vienna (Austria)

1946

1,900,000

27.0 - 35.0%%

Numbers in conflict are in Table B with the author's comments

• Comments on Table B (below):

Bonn: The official figures purport that the death rate in the prosperous
and mainly peaceful year of 1939 was 21% higher than the disastrous
year of hunger, 1947. A parallel anomaly exists between 1947 and 1950.
Also, the subsidiary figures for 1947 for men (44,048) and for women
(55,825) do not add up to the total population given of 101,498. In
view of the conditions of the years 1939, 1947 and 1950, the author
finds that the official death toll for 1947 is incredible.

Karlsruhe: Because the official report from the authorities of Karlsruhe
seemed odd to the author, his assistant conducted research at the offices
of the Catholic church and two of the three Protestant churches, which
shows that among the churched alone, the deaths totalled 2,039. It is
impossible to know now how many dead Karlsruhers in those years
were members of churches, but since the church burials alone exceed
the deaths recorded in the town archives, we know that the town
archives are not dependable.

SOURCES: Local governments except: Berlin - 1945- 46, from Maurice
Pate, 'Reports on Child Health and Welfare Conditions', FEC Papers,
Box 15, the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Also Konrad Adenauer,
speech to Swiss Parliament, March 1949, in Erinnerungen 1945-53,
p. 187. Also Gustav Stolper, German Realities, p. 33, and Herbert
Hoover, who said 41%% in 1946 in his American Epic, Vol. IV,
p. 164. Konigsberg - from Ernst-Gunther Schenck, Das Menschliche
Elend im 20. Jahrhundert, pp. 78-80. Population in 1939 was 368,000.
Vienna - General Mark Clark to Herbert Hoover, 15 April 1946; FEC
Papers, Box 16, the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

TABLE B

Place

Year

Population

Deaths

Death rate

Bonn

1939

100,788

1,278

12.7%%

1947

101,498

1,062

10.5%%

1950

115,394

1,233

n.o%%

Karlsruhe

1946

175,588

1,980

n.3%%

1947

184,376

1,975

10.7%%

Karlsruhe-churched

1946

175,588

2,039

n.6%%

General comments

The statistics that indicate a death rate of normal proportions
from 1946 through to 1950 have one characteristic in common:
they show a near-normal death rate in circumstances that were
agreed by everyone to be abnormally harsh. In fact, some of
them, e.g. for Bonn, indicate that fewer Germans died while
starving, cold, despairing and exposed than died when the
country was prosperous, comfortable, peaceful and well-fed
in the late 1960s - the years of the Wirtschaftswunder, the
'Economic Miracle 1 .

The British Army reported that the death rate in North Rhine
province in 1946 was about 12%%. It fell during the year until it
hit only 8%% in September. The death rate in Hamburg in 1946,
according to official British Army reports, was 14.9%%. Having
started near 20%% in January, by the end of the year, it had
declined to only 12.63%% annually.

In an overall report by Herr Degwitz to the 5th Sitting of the
Zonenbeirat on 10 and 1 1 July 1946, the death total in the
British zone was 5,800 per month more than the deaths in the
same area in 'normal times'. 13 Given that the death rate in
Hamburg, the principal city in the British zone, was 12.03%% in
1938, 14 this means the death rate in the zone in 1946 was around
15.5%%. The increase may seem minimal, but it must be remem-
bered that it rose through 1947 as conditions grew worse. And
modern readers can get the scale of death by remembering that it
is about 50% higher than one experiences in modern society. In
other words, it means that for every two persons you knew who
died recently, you also would have to mourn the death of yet
another.

In April 1947, the Canadian Army General Maurice Pope, Head
of Mission in Berlin, reported to Ottawa that among the elderly,
who constituted a high proportion of the war-ravaged population,
'the death rate is high, and the suicide returns do not show much
improvement'. He concluded, 'To sum up, the situation is bad, as
it always has been.' A few weeks later he reported five 'authenti-
cated' deaths from starvation in Hamburg. L5 The 'authenticated'
is revealing. As many writers said, the Allied officers knew

almost nothing of the true conditions among the German
civilians. The 'authenticated' almost certainly refers to deaths
counted in a hospital. But of course very few sick Germans ever
got to a hospital in those days. As the US Surgeon General
reported in October 1947, 'The alarming scourge is tuberculosis
... In the British zone, as a whole, there are known to be 50,000
open cases and only 12,000 available hospital beds, while the
less serious cases number about 150,000.' 16

The German doctor, A. Lang, Professor of Physiological
Chemistry at the University of Mainz, told an American officer
in April 1948 that the death rate in the Pfalz was only around
13%% in 1947. However, he did not cite the source of his
statistics. If these had been gathered, like the 1946 census, by
'Germans working under the direction of the Allied Control
Council', then one explanation of the low figures could be that
the results had been adjusted to provide a more favourable pic-
ture of the conditions under the Allied occupation. Pfalz was in
the French zone, where rations were consistently lower than in
the British- American zone, so one suspects that the death rate
must have been higher, as for instance it demonstrably was in
Bad Kreuznach. But one other explanation might be that the
people of Pfalz, living close to the land, were able to scrounge
for themselves to augment the official ration better than people
in big cities. The Pfalz was largely rural, lacking any big city,
small in population (under one million), and also very low in
expellee population. Still, it is hard to conceive of a disparity so
great that the people in Bad Kreuznach, so close to the Pfalz and
also in the French zone, were dying twice as fast as the rest of
the population. The statistics are also very hard to reconcile with
those from the town of Landau, right in the Pfalz.

On the subject of health, the American Military Governor Lucius
Clay revealed an interesting comparison of the Soviet with the
western zones. Clay writes that in 1945, the agricultural produc-
tion in the Soviet zone was just under 80% of prewar normal for
some grains, and as high as 90% for grain west of the Elbe, plus
about 75% of the normal livestock harvest. 17 At the same time,
food production in the west was only 57% of the pre-war per
capita production. An interesting sidelight on the Clay statistics is
that since the agricultural work in all the zones was done

exclusively by Germans, and mainly by hand, this superior pro-
duction in the Soviet zone suggests that at that time the people in
the Soviet zone were at least as healthy as Germans in the west.

In sum, then, the figures of local origin generally conform to
the overall statistics derived from the census comparisons and
presented in the main text. The few that do not conform in
general display other characteristics that make one distrust them
a priori.

6 : Sources

The chief archival sources are the KGB Archives in Moscow,
also called the Central State Archives (formerly the Central State
Special Archive, CSSA); the Archive of the October Revolution,
Moscow; the Red Army Archive at Podolsk, near Moscow; the
National Archives of the US in Washington and College Park,
Maryland; the National Archives of Canada in Ottawa; the
Dokumentationsstelle, Bretzenheim, Germany, the Library of
Congress, Washington, and the Hoover Institution Archive at
Stanford. Much of the research material used in this MS has
never before been published. Some of it - at Hoover, Washing-
ton and in Moscow - has only recently been declassified.

Sources for deaths of German civilians, 1945 - 50

The papers of Robert Murphy, former US Ambassador in Lon-
don, also former political adviser to the US Military Governor
of Germany at the Hoover Institution Archive, Stanford; the
reports of the US Military Governor (first Eisenhower, then
Lucius Clay) from archives in Abilene and in Washington;
thousands of pages of documents of the Hoover Famine
Emergency Committee at Stanford; Canadian Army reports on
conditions in Germany; archives in German villages and towns;
the census reports of 1946 and 1950 done by the Allied occu-
pation armies that are still in archives in the West and in
Moscow; reports from the official German government statistical
agency, the Statistisches Bundesamt at Wiesbaden; and the
Robert Patterson Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of
Congress, Washington. In addition, as a result of the publication
of Other Losses, my publishers and I have received thousands

of letters, diaries, books, documents, phone calls and visits from
former prisoners and civilians describing events occurring in
Germany from 1945- 50.

Sources for prisoners of war

The material drawn from Soviet sources is new to readers in both
East and West. Briefly, the central source is the CSA in Moscow,
the most important archive in existence about Second World
War prisoners. Restricted to a few highly-placed Soviet specia-
lists for many years because it contained state secrets, it was
opened to Western researchers for the first time in 1991. The
Soviet regime had long before then revealed many atrocities
committed against Soviet citizens by Stalin, Lavrenty Beria,
Lazar Kaganovich and others. But these newly opened archives
document vast crimes against prisoners from twenty other
countries around the world, including Japan, Germany and Italy.
Here, in grey cardboard boxes, repose millions of individual
dossiers, one for each of more than four million prisoners taken
to the Soviet Union.

Without the Seal of Secrecy

Edited by Dr G. F. Krivosheyev. This book includes the Red
Army's full report on the fate of all prisoners including those
taken by the Red Army. It is authoritative.

German POWs and the NKVD

Master's thesis by Captain V. P. Galitski. Captain Galitski, of the
Russian Navy, spent fifteen years working on the research for
this thesis in Moscow and elsewhere. He visited Toronto in 1996
to give a speech on the topic for the Mecklenburg Historical
Society at Massey College, University of Toronto.

Spravka: the Kashirin Report

In 1993,1 received a six-page report in Russian from the Russian
Army historian Andrei I. Kashirin, whom I also interviewed at
length with his colleagues in Moscow. I am satisfied that this
report represents to the best of his ability, which is professional,
the fate of prisoners of war in the USSR, comprehending other

earlier reports. This Kashirin report records the fate of all
prisoners in Soviet captivity from 1941 to 1952.

The Bulanov Report

This one-page report by Colonel Bulanov prepared in the NKVD
and dated 1956 gives detail of the fates of three ranks of prisoner
from seventeen countries over a period of fifteen years. It was
the NKVD under Lavrenty Beria that ran the prisoner gulag
(Gupwi) and kept the records.

(The above summary reports agree on all prisoner information
essential to this book. The reports below are subsidiary to them.)

The Petrov Report

The background is that in June 1943, Lt. General Ivan Petrov,
chief of the department for prisoners of war in the MVD/NKVD,
reported on prisoner deaths to the Party meeting among officers
of his department. Because this was a Party meeting, the report
was not censored by Beria, and was certainly the truth as Petrov
knew it. He said that up to May 1943, a total of 193,003 Wehr-
macht and German-allied prisoners had died during the whole
war. However, Beria had previously told Stalin that as of 26
February, some 33,000 prisoners had died for the whole war.
Beria's figure of 33,000 dead at 26 February taken with Petrov's,
means that some 160,000 prisoners died in the next couple of
months out of a total holding of 257,000 (62%), against Stalin's
orders. This was due to the fact that the Red Army was not ready
to receive such a huge surrender.

After the initial disorganization at Stalingrad, the NKVD and
army co-operated very closely, and prisoner care improved
radically. As the army entered Germany, if prisoners died or
escaped, German civilians were rounded up to replace them.
The count arriving at the NKVD camps was always the same
as those leaving the front.

The West German Survey of Missing Prisoners
See Appendix 7 below.

7 : German Post-war Surveys of the Missing

Some Western historians who have never consulted the Soviet
archives contend that nearly all of the missing Germans have
been shown, by diligent research, to have been taken prisoner
by the Soviets. One of the Germans most knowledgeable on this
subject is Dr Margarethe Bitter, who was a founder of the first
committee to investigate the fate of the missing, the Ausschufi
fiir Kriegsgefangenenfragen. The results of the Ausschufi were
based on a partial survey begun in 1947 of living Germans only.
The AusschuH could not survey the whole country door-to-door,
so they put up notices in public places asking families and friends
of missing persons to tell the committee the date and place where
that person had last been known. The committee covered the US
zone of Germany thoroughly, the British zone probably adequa-
tely but not thoroughly, the French zone inadequately and the
Russian zone scarcely at all. It is not known what percentage of
the expellees was covered. (In this book, it is assumed that all
were covered, which reduces the number of the missing.)

Left completely uncovered were the citizens of such countries as
Italy, Hungary, Austria and Rumania, which had supplied over
2 million soldiers to the Axis, and about 1.9 million prisoners to
Allied cages. In one Red Cross survey of an American camp for
Germans near Marseille in 1945, over 12% of the 25,000 priso-
ners were Yugoslav, Hungarian, Rumanian, Italian and Swiss. j_8

In all, the Ausschufi covered only some 58- 68% of the potential
recruiting sources of the German army. Thus the Adenauer
government's final estimate of 1,400,000 missing Germans was
too low by scores of thousands. Adding in the losses among
German allies, we see that the true total of missing Axis prisoners
must have been above 1,600,000.* 19

* This does not take into account the men who were missing but
never reported as such because their families had been wiped out.
In the firestorm raid on Dresden, for example, probably more than
100,000 people, nearly all civilians and refugees, died in one night.
Similarly in Hamburg, scores of thousands of civilians died in one

night. Some whole families were undoubtedly wiped out, and thus
could not report a soldier gone missing in captivity after the
war.

The American professor Arthur L. Smith Jr. has said that the Aus-
schufi found that 90% of the addresses of the missing showed
they had last been seen in the east, and were therefore presumed
to be in the hands of the Soviets. He wrote: 'It is very important to
note that this German committee under the very able direction of
Frau Doctor Margarethe Bitter, arrived at its conclusions totally
independent of the influence of the American Military Govern-
ment. ' 20 Yes, indeed, so free was it of that influence that the
AusschuB was not permitted to see the only records that might
have revealed the truth. These were the records kept by the
Americans of the conditions and deaths in the US camps. If, as
Smith says, there was no disaster in the western camps, and
nothing to hide, why were all the records hidden from the Aus-
schuB? If there was nothing to hide, why were so many of the
records destroyed? Why were the rest classified for 25 years?
Sixteen miles of paper, viewed edge-on, came home from Europe
in the army's files after the war, but these few feet of prisoner
records were so dangerous they had to be extracted specially and
burned. Many of these were being destroyed by the Americans at
the time Dr Bitter and Dr Adenauer were working on the fate of
the missing prisoners. 2J_

Smith's statement about Germans 'missing in the east' is not cor-
rect, according to Dr Bitter herself. She said recently that, 'We
didn't know where they were. They could have been among those
who were captured by the Americans . . . They put them in fields
in very bad conditions and many died. I don't think the Red Cross
examined those camps.' 22

Kurt W. Bohme, a German author who has taken the side of the
Western Allies in this dispute, confidently asserts that 91.2% of
the missing were Ostvermissten, or missing in the east, because
that was their last mailing address. However, his own statistics
disprove this because of the long time lag between the last known
address and the end of the war. 23 Almost two-thirds of these
addresses are from 1944 or earlier, anywhere from four and a

half months to a year or more before the end of the war. This
fact affects drastically the usefulness of the addresses, because
for more than a week at the end of the war, millions of Germans
fled the eastern front to the Western Allies. 24 The round-ups of
these soldiers escaping to the west also continued for weeks after
the end of the war on 8 May.

8 : The Prisoners and the Census

Professor Dewey Browder of Austin Peay University in Tennes-
see disagrees with my conclusion that an unusually high number
of deaths occurred in the US zone in 1945- 50. According to
German documents he obtained from the Statistisches Bundesamt
which were published in 1952, 25 the census results for 1946
included those Germans held abroad as prisoners.

If this were true, those prisoners who did return in 1946- 50
should not be added to the population expected to be present in
1950. This would mean that the death toll as presented in this
book would be reduced by the number of prisoners who were
counted as part of the existing German population in 1946.
However, the record referred to by Professor Browder does not
state the total number of such prisoners, so no estimate can be
made of the numbers affected. Professor Browder also cites the
death rate of 12.1%% for Germany in 1947 frequently published
by the Statistisches Bundesamt, and already discussed above.

The author believes that the documentation from the KGB
archives, the US State Department and the Murphy Papers is
comprehensive and fully reliable. Murphy states clearly that the
prisoners are not included in the census figures, but are apart
from them. Murphy's words are:

Preliminary figures from the German census, taken on 29
October 1946 under direction of the Allied Control Council,
show total population of 65,900,000. This includes about
100,000 displaced persons [DPs] (UNRRA Situation Report
of 31 October). Assuming that all these DPs will eventually
leave Germany, this will leave 65,200,000 inhabitants.
German war prisoners still held abroad are estimated by
OMGUS Armed Forces Division at 4,000,000 (consisting

chiefly of 3,000,000 estimated held by USSR). German
expellees still to be returned to Germany are similarly
estimated by OMGUS PW and DP Division at 2,000,000.
This gives a total eventual population for Germany, once
all DPs have left and German war prisoners and expellees
returned, of 71,000,000. However, in order to be conser-
vative, and in view of the present high death rate in Ger-
many, a figure of 69,000,000 will be used.

The French delegate to the Council of Foreign Ministers con-
ference of April 1947 also believed the prisoners were not coun-
ted in the census. He stated: 'Lastly, according to data which the
four Delegations have just exchanged, we may estimate at two
million the number of prisoners who will have to be repatriated. 1
He then adds them to the 66 million 'inhabitants which Germany
has today' and adds as well the 'two million people of German
race ... to be transferred to the interior of Germany'. He con-
cludes that, 'in sum . . . Germany would have about 70 million
inhabitants'.

The delegate was speaking in March 1947, when he believed
that the population of Germany stood at 66 million. Since he
added the prisoners to the 66 million to arrive at the eventual
population, it is clear that he assumed that they were not coun-
ted in the census.

And finally, the well-known expert on Germany Dr Gustav
Stolper, who was on the Hoover Commission fact-finding team,
wrote in German Realities that the 1946 census showed that, of
the total population of 65,900,000 persons, 1,125,885 were
prisoners of war, displaced persons and civilian internees'. He is
in agreement with other contemporary authorities in saying this.
Ambassador Murphy says that 700,000 of these 1,125,885 were
displaced persons, leaving 65,200,000 Germans. The discrepancy
of some 200,000 is discussed in detail in Note 29, Chapter VI.
However, it is clear that no prisoners of war being held outside
Germany in 1946 are included in the population total used in this
book. In the unlikely event that some prisoners being held inside
Germany in 1946 were included in Murphy's 65,000,000 census
total, they did not exceed 300,000 in number, or about 3% of the
total number of the dead.

NOTES

CFM Council of Foreign Ministers

CRS Congressional Record of the Senate

CSSA Central State Special Archive (Moscow)

FEC Famine Emergency Committee

HIA Hoover Institution Archive (Stanford)

LC Library of Congress (Washington)

NAC National Archives of Canada (Ottawa)

NARS National Archives and Record Service

(Washington and Maryland)

OMGUS Office of the Military Governor, United States

PRO FO Public Records Office, Foreign Office (London)

RG Record Group

Further publication details of works cited can
be found in the Select Bibliography.

Foreword

1. See Chapter III.

2. Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 29.

3. Victor Gollancz, Our Threatened Values, p. 96.

Chapter 1 : A Piratical State

1 . Women in Quebec and Switzerland were enfranchised several
decades later.

2. K. A. Jelenski (ed.), History and Hope, p. 29.

3. George H. Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, p. 70.

4. Herbert Hoover, Memoirs, p. 166.

5. Ibid., p. 162.

6. Nash, op. cit., p. 358.

7. The stance and manner are described by Nash in The Life of
Herbert Hoover, p. 84. The passage paraphrased here was, in

Nash's original, used to describe an earlier meeting also
addressed by Hoover.

8. Nash, op. cit., p. 85.

9. Hoover, An American Epic, Vol. IV, p. 17.

10. Hoover, Memoirs, p. 176.

11. Ibid., p. 168.

12. Ibid., p. 170.

13. Nash, op. cit., Chapter IV; Hoover, Memoirs, pp. 152ff.

14. Minutes of British War Cabinet Meeting No. 122, held on
18 April 1917, microfilm in National Archives of Canada.

15. Hoover to the Acting Secretary of State, Paris, 25 December
1918, in Paris Peace Conference, 1919, II, pp. 477-8; quoted
in Edward F. Willis, Herbert Hoover and the Russian
Prisoners of World War I, p. 22.

16. Vernon Kellogg quoted in George J. Lerski, Herbert Hoover
and Poland, p. 20.

17. Hoover, Memoirs, p. 360.

18. Martin H. Glynn, 'The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop!' in the
American Hebrew, 13 October 1919, pp. 582-3. Glynn was the
40th Governor of New York State, during 1913-14. In 1919,
the year he wrote the article, he was a member of President
Wilson's industrial conference.

19. Francis William O'Brien (ed.), Two Peacemakers in Paris,
pp. 166-7; Hoover, op. cit., p. 358.

20. O'Brien, op. cit, p. 186.

21. Ibid., pp. 186-7.

22. Hoover to Wilson, March and April 1919, quoted in O'Brien,
op. cit., p. 115.

23. O'Brien, op. cit, p. 129.

24. Ibid., p. xiii.

25. Ibid.

26. Balfour quoted in Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage, p. 143.

27. O'Brien, op. cit., p. 156.

28. Hoover, Memoirs, p. 345.

29. Ibid., p. 341.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid., p. 342.

32. Ibid., p. 344.

Chapter 2 : The Beginning of Wisdom?

1. Babinski to King, 18 July 1945: Mackenzie King, Diaries
(microfiche, University of Toronto Library), p. 696.

2. Richard Overy, The Road to War, p. 188.

3. Winston Churchill, The Grand Affiance, p. 370.

4. An Analysis of American Public Opinion Regarding the War', a
confidential report by George Gallup, American Institute of
Public Opinion, Ptinceton, September 1942 (NAC, W L. M.
King Papers, 1940- 50), pp. C2588051ff

5. Life and the New York Times, quoted in Paul Kennedy,
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 478.

6. Quoted in Gary Dean Best, Herbert Hoover: The Post-
Presidential Years, Vol. II, p. 321.

7. See Arthur L. Smith, Churchill's German Army (Beverley Hills,
CA: Sage Publications).

8. King, Diaries, p. 916.

9. Ibid., p. 75. Sir William Mulock was a Canadian Cabinet minister,
and Sir Wilfrid Laurier Prime Minister of Canada from 1896 to 1911.

10. The Americans sent more than 400,000 jeeps and trucks; 13,000
locomotives and freight cars; 90 cargo ships; 4,000 bombers;
10,000 fighters; and over 7,000 tanks (FEC Papers, HIA). The British
and Canadians sent over 5,000 tanks; 7,000 aircraft; machinery, steel
rails, wheat and much else.

11. W. Averell Harriman, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, p. 277.

12. So many thousands of miles of Canadian rails were sent to the USSR
that prisoners of war were still building the BAM (Baikal- Amur) line
in Siberia with them in 1949. Letters to the author from Hans Wollen-
weber (1993), Fred Pichler (1992), and others.

13. State Department Memo ( Division of Financial and Monetary Affairs),
19 February 1945 (E. E. Hunt Papers, Box 47, HIA).

14. John Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory, pp. 804-5.

15. See Henry C. Morgenthau, Germany is Our Problem.

16. Fred Smith, United Nations World, March 1947 (UN Library, New York).
See the Epilogue in Bacque, Other Losses, second edition, for a fuller
account of this meeting.

17. Smith, op. cit.

18. Memorandum of conversation, Lord Keynes, 26 November 1944, NARS.

19. Alfred Grosser, The Colossus Again: West Germany from Defeat to
Rearmament (London: Allen & Unwin, 1955), p. 18.

20. Quoted in John Morton Blum, Roosevelt and Morgenthau, p. 591.

21 . Cordell Hull, The Memoirs ofCordell Hull, p. 1614.

22. NARS, RG 226, Box 176, Folder 2327.

23. Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service
in Peace and War, p. 580.

24. Martin Gilbert, The Road to Victory, p. 995.

25. According to Jean-Pierre Pradervand, Chief Delegate of the
International Committee of the Red Cross in France, the
Americans never informed him that they had camps in France
in 1945. However, at least one camp, near Marseille, was visited
in 1945. The author has several times requested ICRC permission
to visit their archives in Geneva to check on this and other
mattters, and has been repeatedly refused.

26. Memorandum, 'Handling of Prisoners of War in the Communi-
cations Zone', by Lt. Col. Henry W. Allard, June 1946 (Archives,
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas).

27. For more, see Bacque, Other Losses.

28. Armando Boscolo, Fame in America (the words are in Italian,
and mean 'Hunger in America'), plus interviews with several ex-
prisoners. Because the records have been destroyed, or are still
withheld, it is impossible to determine the death rate. However,
it certainly did not rise to the levels experienced in the camps
in Europe.

29. See John Gimbel, Science, Technology and Reparations; also
Balfour and Mair, Four-power Control in Germany and Austria.

30. Speeches of Senator Kenneth S. Wherry, CRS, January-March
1946. For other sources, see Chapter V.

31. Gilbert, op. cit, p. 965.

32. Senator William Langer, CRS, 29 March 1 946.

33. CRS, Vol. 92, Pts 1-2 (29 January 1946), p. 509.

34. With thanks to Prof. Pierre van den Berghe.

35. Victor Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, p. 45.

36. Ibid., p. 78.

37. Ibid., p. 77.

38. Hilldring to State, RG 59, 3726A, NARS Washington.

39. Gollancz, op. cit., passim.

40. CRS, op. cit.,p. 515.

4 1 . Albrecht is cited in various speeches of Wherry et al. in the
CRS for January to March 1946. His predictions are partly
confirmed by experience recorded in the FEC Papers at
Stanford, notably Murphy's prediction that deaths would out-
number births by at least two million, and in Gustav Stolper,
German Realities.

42. This means most children under ten and people over sixty. The
rough estimate for children under ten is as follows: in normal
times, 90% of those born survive to the age often. Since about
900,000 babies were born per year, this means about nine mil-
lion potential total. If 90% survive, that equals approximately
eight million alive after ten years. If half die, that equals four
million dead. If only 10% of persons then between the ages of
60 and 80 had survived from among those born in 1865- 85,
the potential was around fourteen million born, 1.4 million
still alive, with half dying gives a total of 700,000. See
Adenauer, op. cit., and population tree in Gustav Stolper.

43. Senator Wherry, quoting Probst Griiber (CRS, op. cit, p. 515).
Thanks to Paul Boytinck.

44. This and the quotes from Johnson are from the CRS, op. cit.,
pp. 514-16.

45. The words in quotation are the paraphrase by F. Roy Willis of
the report, in Willis, The French in Germany, p. 124.

46. Ibid.

47. See Appendix 5.

48. Montgomery to Mackenzie King, 24 October 1945, in King,
Diaries, p. 1028.

49. Field Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, Memoirs
(London, 1958), p. 415.

50. In The Progressive, quoted by Senator Wherry (CRS, op. cit.,
p. 517).

51. See Chapter V.

52. As, for instance, US Navy officer A. R. Behnke.

53. Senator Wherry, CRS, op. cit., p. 518.

54. bid.

55. Senator Langer, CRS, March 1946, p. 2801.

56. King, op. cit, p. 841.

Chapter 3 : 'From There No Prisoner Returned'

1. For the Soviets, see: Spravka, by Russian Army historian Col.
Andrei Kashirin, Moscow, January 1993; also G. F. Krivoshe-
yev (ed.), Without the Seal of Secrecy: The Losses of the
Soviet Armed Forces in Wars, Military Campaigns and Con-
flicts; also Captain V. P. Galitski, German POWs and the
NKVD; also the report of the Chief of the Prison Department
of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Colonel P. Bulanov
('the Bulanov Report'), corrected by Pogachev, 28 April 1956.
In IP, Ole (transliterated from Cyrillic letters) in the CSS A,
Moscow.

For the captures of the Western Allies in north-west Europe,
see: 'Report on Totals of Prisoners of War Taken', SHAEF Gl,
1 1 June 1945, 383.6/1-3, NARS Washington; for Canadians
distinct from British, see report of General H. D. G. Crerar cove-
ring operations of First Canadian Army 1 1 March to 5 May
1945, in MG 26 J-4, Vol. 410, File 3978, Sheet C288484, NAC;
for Allies in Africa/Italy, see Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe
and Col. Dr Ernest F Fisher, US Army historian.

The Western Allies overall took 'about 8,000,000 German sol-
diers' according to A. T. Lobdell, Commanding Officer of the
German prisoners in Iowa, Minnesota and the Dakotas. Since
the Axis armies captured were composed in the West of about
85% Germans, this means that the total prisoner take (which is
the chief concern here), was around 9.4 million persons. Memo
to Governor Dwight Griswold, 9 January 1947, in RG 260
OMGUS, Bundesarchiv, Koblenz. One of the US Army histo-
rians gives the total for Germans held in northwest Europe alone
in May 1945, as 7,005,732 - see Oliver J. Frederiksen, The Ame-
rican Military Occupation of Germany, 1945-1953 (Historical
Division, HQ, US Army Europe, 1953), p. 89. This excludes
Italy and the prisoners held in North America captured in North
Africa and Sicily.

2. Most of those captured in the West were Germans who were
held in Italy, western Germany and France. A few hundred
thousand were held in the UK, and about half a million in North
America. The Soviets distributed theirs, including a million
non-German Europeans, through a system with some 6,000 sub-
camps, spread throughout the whole USSR. See Galitski, op.
cit.

3. The first was found by Jakob Zacher in the archives of
Langenlonsheim. Copies available in Dokumentationsstelle,
Kriegsgefangenenlager Bretzenheim, Bretzenheim/Nahe.

4. The witness has asked that his name not be revealed.

5. Brech to the author, letters and interviews, 1990 and 1991.

6. Brech' s camp at Andernach was in the Advance Section zone
of the Army, where the conditions were described by the Medi-
cal History of the ETO as typical of conditions throughout US
camps in Europe.

7. This exemption was meaningless, because the prisoners were
not registered by name for many weeks, so no one in the US
command, much less a German civilian, could find out who
was inside. Only by a chance sighting through the wire could

a civilian find a family member. An exception to the strict order
not to allow civilians to provide food seems to have occurred in
the camp at Emmering near Ftrstenfeldbruck, when in May 1945
the local clergy and civilians assembled supplies from their own
meagre stores and were permitted to deliver them to the prisoners.
See a series of articles on the camp in the Emmeringer Gemeinde
Spiegel, March 1986.

8. Hansy Scharf of California, interview with the author, 1991 .

9. Berwick has said that he never ordered anyone to shoot at
prisoners. This author accepts that statement without question.

10. Interview with Herr Tullius in Bretzenheim, July 1991 .

1 1 . Interview with the author, 1991.

12. Tagebuch with the author.

13. Interview with the author, October 1996. Dr Allensworth disso-
ciates himself entirely from the author's overall criticism of US
policy.

14. State to American Embassy, Paris, 12 May 1945, in 740.621 14/
5-445 State Department Archives, Washington.

1 5 . Town of Bad Kreuznach, post 60, file no. 6754 06 WASt: War
Graves lists for 1954 and 1963. Also cited in G. Maria Shuster,
Die Kriegsgefangenenlager Galgenberg und Bretzenheim
(Stadtverwaltung Bad Kreuznach, 1985).

16. Shown to the author by Heinz Btcher of Btdesheim, who is
writing a history of the camp at Dietersheim.

17. Captain Berwick has told the author that: 'I take issue with the
accounts of starvation at Camp A6 [Bretzenheim].' He met every
day with the German Lager captains (leaders of each cage within

the enclosure), and does not remember any complaints that food
was insufficient.

18. The names of the prisoners are Paul Bastian, Konrad Schildwach-
ter, Paul Kaps, Walter Drechsel, Erich Werner, Dr Herbert Bolte,
Rudi Sauer, Gerhard Wo Iter, Winfried Punder and Rolf Freyer.
Civilians who commented on the camp were Frau Griinwald, Frau
Bastian, Frau Lambert and Frau Blank, all of Bretzenheim.

19. Letter of Herbert Peters of Hilden, Germany, to his son. In the
author's possession.

20. Letter of recommendation, 8 July 1945. Signed Lt. Roy D. Schnei-
der, HQ Dispensary, Detachment B, 50th US Field Hospital. In
possession of Rudi Buchal, Grossenhain, Germany. Copy with the
author.

21. Paul Bastian, interview with the author, 1991; Konrad Schild-
wachter, letter, November 1990.

22. Quoted in 'Menschen in Lagern an der Nahe und im Hunsriick

in PZ-Information 8/86 (Bad Kreuznach: Padagogisches Zentrum,
1986) p. 46.

23. Other US soldiers at the camp - Bill Dodge, Tiller Carter and
Frank Borbely - all said that Captain Lee Berwick's figures on
the camp were probably accurate in their opinion.

24. Most of the records referred to here are filed under HQ 106th
Infantry Division, Office of the Surgeon, APO 443 US Army,
Annual Report Medical Activities 1945, signed Beizer, dated

18 September 1945. They are from Record Group 332 at or around
Box 18, others from RG 1 12 at and around Box 313. All were at
NARS Suitland until the recent move to College Park, Maryland.

25. The number varied during the period, which lasted from about
mid- April to 10 July 1945. Enclosures actually in use varied
during the period from zero at 14 April to possibly seventeen at
the end of May. Some camps were shown as projected in reports,
but never reported as containing prisoners. On 3 IMay sixteen
are shown, of which fourteen were occupied. They were all in the
ASCZ, on and near the Rhine (HQ Adsec Com Z, Office of the
Surgeon, Report).

26. Status of Med Service PWTE Report, HQ, Adsec, Office of the
Surgeon, April- June 1945, RG 332 Box 15, NARS College Park.
Also Robert Hughson's official ration book for Bretzenheim, in
Dokumentationsstelle, Bretzenheim, which lists hospital occu-
pancy as well as rations and number of POWs in camp. Copy in
the author's possession.

27. See p. 17 of the 106th Medical Report. The records for American
patients are remarkably complete, showing for instance that the
ambulance services of the 106th made 2,434 trips covering
193,949 miles, evacuating 21,551 prisoners to 'evacuation
hospitals' in May to 10 July. The Hospital Unit statistics of the
106th Division Medical Report covered all the American
Rhine camps including Bretzenheim from the end of April to

10 July 1945.

28. Interview with the author, November 1987.

29. Dr Joseph Kirsch, cited in Gerard Ostreicher, 'Ces prisonniers
allemands "Morts pour raisons diverses'" inLe Republicain
Lorrain, 3 June 1990.

30. It is possible that some of the 'evacuation hospitals' indeed
treated their patients well. The prisoner Werner Borrmann of
Quebec reported that he was sent to a small hospital near Idstein,
then Bad Schwalbach, where German doctors and nurses treated
him well. Borrmann believes that these hospitals were under
American supervision; however, the French were taking control
of the region in early July, so the responsibility may have lain
with them.

3 1 . Experience of many prisoners, including Wolf von Richthofen,
Paul Kaps and Heinz Thaufelder.

32. In so-called 'hospitals supporting PWTEs', 16,229 beds were
unoccupied in June 1945.

33. Letter from Marshal of the French Army Alphonse Juin to US
Army General John T. Lewis, 1 1 October 1945 (NARS).

34. Lauben to Paul, 7 July 1945 (SHAEF Papers, Modern Military
Records, NARS, Washington).

35. The patient load was admissions to hospital units of 44,646 less
the evacuations to evacuation hospitals 'further to the rear' of
21,551, equals load of 23,095. But because there were 26,000 to
31,860 people not accounted for and not found at French takeover,
it is clear that there were either more deaths in the hospital units
than the figures show, and/or more men were evacuated to the
evacuation hospitals than the figures show. The most conservative
estimate is that 26,000 died in the evacuation hospitals, leaving
around 5,860 as the patient load among whom 1,392 deaths were
actually recorded. Or it may be that the 1,392 dead formed only the
recorded part of the total of 26,000 otherwise unrecorded deaths

in the evacuation hospitals and hospital units. In any case, to the
hospital unit deaths must be added not only the evacuation hospi-

tal deaths as above, but also the deaths in the camp itself, apart
from the hospitals. Reports, HQ 106th Infantry Division, Office
of the Surgeon, various dates in 1945. Most are in RG 112, entry
31 ETO, in or near Box 313 (NARS).

36. Report of Jennings B. Marshall, Major, Medical Corps Comman-
ding, 50th Field Hospital, Detachment A, Bad Kreuznach,

29 May 1945. Records of 50th Field Hospital Unit, RG 1 12
and 407, Boxes 411-14 (NARS).

37. Dokumentationsstelle, Kreigsgefangenenlager Bretzenheim.
The lowest death rate so far discovered in an American field
hospital unit is reported by the 62nd Field Hospital, where some
4% of the patients died in eighty days (approximately 18% per
year). This does not include the deaths in the camp itself (Kripp)
nor in the evacuation hospital to which the moribund were sent.

38. See the report of Dr Siegfried Enke of Wuppertal on p. 48 of
Bacque, Other Losses (Note 21).

39. The calculation is as follows: the Dellmann observations of
3,000 to 4,000, based on the average population of Bretzenheim
- about 73,800 for the ten weeks - show the death rate was around
21 to 28% per year. It is not clear whether Dellmann' s figures
include both the two hospital unit cages and the twenty non-
medical cages, so it is assumed here that they do, leading to a
lower estimate for the death rate. Bretzenheim was about 13% of
the total 106th population, so it probably accounted for about
3,380 to 4,142 of the 26,000 to 31,860 missing (French source)
and not accounted for (American source) in the 106th cages on

1 July. The death total therefore is somewhere between a mini-
mum of 6,380 and a maximum of 8,142. The death rate is there-
fore somewhere between 45 and 57.5% per year.

40. Sources: Pastor Dellmann, Rudy Buchal, and Captain Lee Ber-
wick plus extrapolations by the author from 50th and 106th
records.

41. Bretzenheim's \3%pro rata share of total shown as evacuated in
106th records.

42. The total of prisoners disposed of in the breakdowns of returns,
deaths, evacuations to the rear and admissions of communicable
diseases in the hospital units is slightly more than the total shown
as evacuated from the main part of the camp to the hospital units.
The excess may be due to double counting of some prisoners retur-
ning alive from the evacuation units, but this is unlikely since none
is recorded. Or it may be due to double counting of men with two
communicable diseases. The total of these extra people is 2,418. If

indeed they were all living prisoners returning from the evacua-
tion units, and are therefore to be subtracted from the 31,860 men
for whom the Americans could not directly account, then the total
of those for whom the Americans could not account on turnover
shrinks from 31,860 to 29,442. The number not there according to
Lauben was 22,000; the number missing according to the French
was 26,000.

43. The details are as follows :

TOTAL EVACUATIONS FROM ENCLOSURES THEMSELVES 44,646
RETURNED TO ENCLOSURES AFTER TREATMENT 12,786

MISSING/NOT ACCOUNTED FOR

(including 1,392 actually reported

dead in hospital units) 3 1 ,860

DEATHS REPORTED INSIDE ENCLOSURES

(apart from evacuations to hospital units) 1,697

33,557

All 106th Division figures from Reports of the Surgeon, 106
Division, 18 Sept. 1945, signed by Lt. Col. M. S. Beizer. Camp
populations from HQ AdSec Medical Status of PWTE Reports,
NARS, and from original US Army ration book of Camp Bret-
zenheim, Dokumentationsstelle, Bretzenheim, Germany.

44. The population of the camps in the period was as shown above
for 1 May-15 June, plus the figure for 7 July given by Colonel
Lauben of 170,000.

45. See Bacque, Other Losses, Appendix 2.

46. It was Colonel Lauben who told me in 1988 the true meaning
of the term 'other losses', a category of prisoners in the US
Army records. He said that it was almost entirely deaths. Since
Lauben was Chief of the German Affairs Branch of SHAEF in
1945, in charge of repatriating prisoners, his word was authori-
tative. While the BBC was preparing in 1990 a TV documen-
tary on these camps, Col. Lauben received a call from a US
Army historian in Washington. The 'Pentagon official', as Lau-
ben called him, said that I had misinformed Lauben about my
research and about the state of the prisoners. The army histo-
rian, who had not been in Germany, also informed Lauben that
he had misunderstood his own experiences. He said that the
prisoners had not been maltreated, and any who were shown in
the column headed 'Other Losses' had simply been transferred

to another US Army command in Europe. There was no other US

Army command in Europe. And, of course, it is an absurd notion
that a foreign writer could walk into the home of a US Army
officer and make him admit against his will that he had been part
of a vast atrocity and cover-up. Clearly, great pressure was
brought to bear on Lauben by the Army following his voluntary
statements to me. Following this, Lauben issued a statement
saying that he had made a mistake when talking to me.

47. An honorable exception: Paul Carell and Gunther Bodekker in
Die Gefangenen press this point hard, without, however, being
able to advance anything more than well-founded suspicion of
the French and American death figures.

48. See Bacque, Other Losses, Chapter IX.

49. Ex-prisoner Hans Goertz of Bonn, in interview with author, Bonn,
April, 1986.

50. Senator Langer, speech in the US Senate, CRS (microfilm),
Vol. 92, Pts 3-4 (29 March 1946), p. 2806. See also Le Figaro,
22 and 29 September 1945.

51. Langer, op. cit., pp. 2806-7.

52. Werner Waldemar of Toronto, interview. Also from camps in
Norway, Paul Herman Bastian of Bad Kreuznach and Rudi Sauer
of Laubenheim/Nahe.

53. Bacque, Other Losses, p. 266.

54. Armando Boscolo, Fame in America ('Hunger in America'), Chap-
ter XV. Dr Cabito, the doctor in the camp for Italian POWs in
Hereford, Texas, wrote a strong letter of protest in August 1945
about continued inadequate rations, which had often descended
to 1,500-1,600 calories per day. During an inspection by an
American colonel two days before, the mess of the company was
reduced to fried skins of potatoes and officers were eating crickets
and locusts which had been fried in mineral oil, sold in the 'Stores'
as hair tonic. His letter was forwarded to the Italian ambassador
and the Red Cross representative who finally visited the camp on
28 October 1945.

55. The Patterson Papers, Library of Congress.

56. See Bacque, Other Losses.

57. Memo dictated 'for files' by General Clark, 30 August 1945. Cour-
tesy of Jane Yates, Archivist, Citadel Archives, Charleston, SC.

58. Interview with the author, Clarksville, Tennessee, March 1988.

59. Memorandum 'Handling of Prisoners of War in the Communica-
tions Zone' by Lt. Col. Henry W. Allard, June 1946, Archives, Fort
Leaven worth, Kansas.

60. Interview by the author and Elisabeth Bacque with Mr and Mrs
Jean-Pierre Pradervand, Switzerland, 1990. From records
published in Erich Maschke, Die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen
des Zweiten Weltkrieges, it appears that in 1945 the ICRC did
make a few visits to US Army labour camps where German
prisoners worked.

61 . This story was brought to my attention by Professor Richard
Miiller of Aachen. It is given in detail in the report of Plemper
to the author, November 1991. Heising adds: 'I am not sure
whether I repressed that cruel fact out of my mind or see it in a
shadowy way or see it with the eyes of my friend ... we tried not
to see suffering in extenso and dying comrades.' Letter to the
author, November 1991.

Chapter 4 : A Holiday in Hell

1. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, p. 525.

2. Captain V. P. Galitski, German POWs and the NKVD. The ad-
ministration for the camps for POWs and internees, the 'Gupwi',
was separate from the Gulag. Very little has been written about
this administration compared to the Gulag. For excellent first-
hand accounts of German prisoners in Soviet hands see Ernst
H. Segschneider (ed.), Jahre im Abseits. Erinnerungen an die
Kriegsgefangenschaft, and Dietmar Sauermann and Renate
Brockpahler, 'Eigentlich wollte ichja alles vergessen . . .'
Erinnerungen an die Kriegsgefangenschaft, 1942-1955.

3. Interview with Galitski, Moscow, 16 May 1993, translator
Martin Reesink.

4. Article by Galitski in Military Historical Journal for 1993,
issue No. 2.

5. From the article by Galitski in VIZh-Voenno-Istoricheski
Zhurnal, 1993, No. 2, p. 18, quoting an interview between
G. Kurtz and Karl-Heinz Friser.

6. TskhDIK, F. 47p, op. 22, d. 1, 1. 97, Moscow. See also Galitski
in VIZh, op. cit. p. 22.

7. Author's estimate. Galitski believes that the number of dead
between 1941 and 1944 was somewhat higher, perhaps as high
as 250,000, which would mean that the post-war death rate
would be reduced.

8. Document E, NKVD order of 18 October 1944, 'To Improve Pro-
duction', CSS A. The order specifies more rations for the weak
and sick, less for criminals and automatic arrest categories.

9. Konrad Adenauer, Erinnerungen, 1953-1955, p. 451.

10. It may be objected that these reports cannot be trusted because
experience shows that Western Allied reports of adequate
rations for post-war prisoners were seldom true. Both the French
and the Americans have officially reported that adequate rations
were fed to prisoners who were in fact starving. However, these
French and American reports have been widely publicized and
deposited in, for example, national archives such as the Bundes-
archiv in Koblenz. The difference is that the Soviet reports were
kept secret for forty years in the KGB archives because they
formed part of a series of documents that, taken all together,
reveal a grotesque atrocity. This information was never revealed
by the Soviets while they were in power. In general the Soviet
documents can be trusted.

1 1 . Anton Chekhov, The Island: A Journey to Sakhalin, p. 108.

12. Interview with Galitski, Moscow, May 1993.

13. Interview with Alex Adourian, Toronto, January 1993.

14. Letter from Hans J. Miirbe, a former prisoner in Canada. With the
author. See also Henry Faulk, Die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen
in Grofibritannien -Re-education (Munich, 1970).

15. Edward Norbeck, 'Eddoko: A Narrative of Japanese Prisoners of
War in Russia' in Rice University Studies (Houston, TX),

Vol. 57, No. 1 (Winter 1971), p. 19.

16. Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin (New York: Free Press), p. 29.
Volkogonov also told me similar things during an interview
at Staraya Ploshschad in Moscow on 17 May 1993.

17. W. Anders, An Army in Exile (London: Macmillan).

18. Louis Fitzgibbon, Katyn: A Crime Without a Parallel, p. 183.

19. Politburo Minutes, 5 March 1940, File No. P. 13/144, Archive
of the President of the Russian Federation, Moscow. With
thanks to Dmitri Volkogonov.

20. F-2, Op. I, D.259, in the Archive of the President of the Russian
Federation, Moscow. With thanks to Dmitri Volkogonov.

2 1 . See Nikolai Tolstoy, The Minister and the Massacres; also
Tolstoy, Victims of Yalta; also Elfrieda and Peter Dyck, Up
from the Rubble.

22. In conversation with the author, 1993 and 1994. Tolstoy's book
The Minister and the Massacres gives details of the story.

23. G. F. Krivosheyev (ed.), Without the Seal of Secrecy, p. 390.

24. V. P. Galitski presented these figures in a paper given at a con-
ference at Massey College, University of Toronto, on 19 May
1996. Galitski has written his Master's thesis on the topic. An
NKVD report signed by Colonel Bulanov reports 356,687
Germans died (Report of the Chief of the Prison Department,
NKVD, 28 April 1956, CSSA).

25. Kashirin, Spravka, op. cit. Galitski points out that the Soviets
counted Austrians separately from Germans, although the Ger-
mans regarded the two as one. Since 1945, the nations have
been separate, and therefore have counted their dead separately.
The difference of some 27,000 prisoners dead is probably
accounted for by different criteria for deciding who was a German.
For instance, were ethnic Germans from Alsace-Lorraine regarded
as Germans? The difference of 27,000 is approximately 1% of the
total take, or 6% of the deaths.

26. See William F. Nimmo, Behind a Curtain of Silence.

27. UN Yearbook 1951, p. 564. The figure is lower than the missing
figure used elsewhere in this book (1.4 million) partly because
the continuing investigation revealed more prisoners missing
than thought when the UN submission was made, and mainly
because the German government calculated the almost 300,000
captive civilians separately from the soldiers. The true total of
missing Germans was therefore above 1.4 million.

28. For full details, see Appendices 2 and 7.

29. Interview with the author, Munich, June 1991.

30. See Kurt W. Bohme, Gesucht Wird (Munich: Suddeutscher-
Verlag, 1970).

31. Dr Bitter was founder of the AusschuB fur Kriegsgefangenenfrage,
which under the authority of three German Lander (provinces)
investigated the fate of missing German prisoners. Dr Bitter began
this investigation in 1947. When the Federal government took
over in 1950, Dr Bitter continued her contributions. A copy of the
eventual Federal government report was deposited by the German
government with the United Nations in New York (see UN Library).
The version in the author's possession was given him by Dr Bitter.
It is entitled German Prisoners of War and Missing Members of the
Wehrmacht (Second World War), Part I, Volume 1, Third Revised
and Completed Edition, 30 June 1953.

32. Interviews with Dr Bitter in 1991, by telephone and in person.
Tapes and transcripts with the author. Dr Bitter went on to say:
'We didn't know exactly where they were, they could have been

in any camp. They could have been dead. These were more or
less theoretical calculations . . . the time when a missing person
had been last seen could have been many months before the
end of the war. Yes, oh yes. In Russia, they could have been . . .
and they could have been also among those who had been
especially captured by the Americans, for whom there were no
camps, you see . . . they put them in fields and let them [hesi-
tation] ... in very bad conditions for a few months and so and
many died and so on . . .' And in another conversation with the
author she said, 'C 'est pas certain que les prisonniers disparus
etaient en mains Russes' ('It is not certain that the vanished
prisoners were in Russian hands'). For another example, see
Arthur L. Smith, one of the major proponents of the 'dead in
the east' theory, in Die 'vermisste Million '. Zum Schicksal
deutscher Kriegsgefangener nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg
(Munich, 1992). According to one member of the Volksbund
der Kriegsgraberfursorge, the German agency in charge of
finding and maintaining German war graves in Russia, this
book makes 'no relevant research contribution'. Letter to Lotte
Borgmann of Rheinberg, July 1994.

33. Professor Stefan Karner of the University of Graz, Austria, has
said that perhaps 800,000 of the missing Germans are accounted
for by 'disappearance' between capture at the front and arrival at
the base prison camp. He refers to this himself as a ' Schaetzung\
or estimate: 'Die Schaetzung von mindestens 800,000 vor der
Registrierung verstorbener deutscher Kriegsgefangener basiert
auf Erfahrungen mit der von mir durchgefuhrten Erhebung
osterreicher, luxemburgischer, Siidtiroler und franzosischer
Kriegsgefangener' in Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte,

3 July 1994, p. 449. See also Appendix 2.

34. Bischof and Ambrose, Eisenhower and the German POWs, p. 144.

35. See Note l,Ch. III.

36. Overmans also says that at the beginning of 1945, the US army
held 300,000 German prisoners, but he does not give any US
Army source for this. The top US Army source, the Theater
Provost Marshal General, reported that, as of 27 December
1944, the 12th Army Group and the 6th Army Group had
together taken over 400,000 German prisoners in the European
campaign since 6 June 1944, plus 229,000 more in Tunisia. The
official American total is therefore more than double the number
reported by Overmans.

37. Erich Maschke, Die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen in amerika-
nischer Hand (Munich, Verlag Ernst and Werner Gieseking,
1973), especially the volume by Kurt W. Bohme.

38. At the end of the war, Germans constituted around 68% of
the total Soviet catch of Axis prisoners (Bulanov Report,
CSSA, Moscow). Without the Seal of Secrecy (colloquially in
Moscow, 'The Red Book') reports that the total fascist catch at
the end of 1944 was 1,836,996. Allowing for 32% of the
catch as non-German, Germans in Soviet captivity numbered
about 1,248,000 at the end of 1944. See also Maschke,

Vol. XV, pp. 194,224.

39. From Martin K. Sorge, The Other Price of Hitler's War (West-
port, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), p. 63. For the missing at
31 March 1945 (1,281,285), see also Kriegstagebuch des
Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht, Vol. IV, edited by Percy Ernst
Schramm (Frankfurt: Bernard Graefe Verlag, 1961), p. 1515.

40. How can we account for the fact that the Soviets reported more
captures than the OKW thought they had lost among the army?
The difference can be accounted for in part by the losses among
the navy and air force. These amounted to 256,000 for the
whole war 1939-January 1945, on all fronts (Sorge, op. cit.,

p. 63). Since most air force and navy losses were in the west, the
eastern component was probably under 50,000. The remainder
were probably men estimated as dead by the OKW who were
actually alive and captured.

41. For a full description of the massive errors in accounting for
prisoners in the west, see Bacque, Other Losses, with special
reference to Col. Philip A. Lauben, Milton A. Reckord and
French Army Captain Julien.

42. Hans von Luck, Panzer Commander, with an Introduction by
Stephen E. Ambrose (New York: Praeger), p. 214.

43. Captain Harry G. Braun, Of Islands and Ships ( Alameda, CA,
1991), p. 101.

44. Professor Stefan Karner in Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte
(July 1994).

45. See p. 65. The original title is Dokumentation der Vertreibung
der Deutschen aus Ost-Mittel Europa.

46. Galitski, German POWs and the NKVD, op. cit.; and Kashirin,
Spravka, op. cit.

47. Interviews with two German researchers in the CSSA in Moscow,
1992, and with Mme V. Fatiukhina of the Russian Red Cross.

48. Nimmo, op. cit., p. 96.

49. Ibid., p. 95.

50. Letter from William Nimmo to the author, January 1993 .

51. MVD report dated 1950 in Archive of the October Revolution,
Moscow. Publicly quoted by Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail
Gorbachev following research supplied to them by Alexei
Kirichenko, Sector Head, USSR Academy of Sciences, Institute
of World Economics and International Relations, Moscow.

52. When questioned as to the possibility that the NKVD records
were falsified at some point, the chief prisoner specialist in the
CSSA, Ludmilla Nosyreva, said that she did not believe they
had been falsified. Anatoly S. Prokopenko, Deputy Head of the
Archives Committee of Russia and policy adviser on archival
law to Russian president Boris Yeltsin, has said that he does not
think that the NKVD records were falsified, although it is likely
that one part - the entry for the cause of death on the certificates
- was sometimes altered to make it appear more 'natural', or less
shameful to the Soviets.

53. According to Eddy Reese, one of the senior archivists of the
Modern Military Records of the US NARS in Washington, soon
after the war, and while the Germans under Dr Bitter were inves-
tigating the fate of their missing prisoners, 'all non-record camp
documents were destroyed'. Conversation with the author,
Washington, 1987.

54. Years after the publication of Other Losses, the Public Records
Office has said that the Report is at last available.

55. Report of T. de Faye, Major, Acting Commander, 4th Regiment,
Winnipeg Rifles, to HQ 2/7 Canadian Infantry Brigade, 23 No-
vember 1945. In RG 24, Vol. 10,976, File 260C7009D19, NAC.

56. Approximately 1.4 million were determined missing in the
incomplete survey instituted by Dr Bitter. Most Germans living
west of the Soviet zone were covered, but fewer than 50% in the
Soviet zone were covered. Pro rata to population, probably an-
other 300,000 or so were missing without Dr Bitter's researchers
being notified. In addition, nearly 300,000 civilian and para-
military prisoners were taken. See Appendix 2.

Chapter 5 : And the Churches Flew Black Flags

1. Diplogerma Multex, Berlin to Moscow, 27 February 1941,
FYI. Found in Murphy Papers, Box 69, HIA. There is a typo in
the original German, which reads in translation that 'there will
be no neutral commission'. It is clear from the context, which is
all predicated on the existence of such a commission, that this
is an error, here corrected.

2. See Dwight Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe.

3. Victor Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, p. 92.

4. Captain Albert R. Behnke, USN MC, 'Physiologic and Psycho-
logic Factors in Individual and Group Survival', June 1958
(Behnke Papers, Box 1, HIA).

5. See Herbert Hoover, An American Epic, Vol. IV, and Addresses
Upon the American Road, 1945- 48.

6. Gustav Stolper, German Realities, p. 67.

7. The worst famine in Holland occurred for some people in the
winter and spring of 1945, 'when the calorie value of the official
rations fell to 400 per day in the larger western cities'. All the
preceding quotes about Holland are from Behnke, op. cit.

8. Montgomery to the British Foreign Office, 27 February 1946,
PRO FO 943/452. Quoted in John E. Farquharson, The Western
Allies and the Politics of Food, p. 110.

9. Hoover, The President's Economic Mission to Germany and
Austria, Human Events Associates, Chicago, 1947, p. 6. Copy
at Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa.

10. John D. Unruh, In the Name of Christ, p. 146.

11. A. O. Littmann, letter to Hoover, 30 January 1947, in FEC
Papers, Box 3, HIA.

12. From various sources, including the Patterson Papers, Library of
Congress; Henry C. Morgenthau, Germany is Our Problem; Report
on Agricultural Production - Germany, Behnke, op. cit. ; OMGUS,
Economic Policies, submitted by Members of the Select Commit-
tee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, September 1947,
p. 19; and Stolper, op. cit.

13. Letter to the author from Ernst Kraemer, Bonn, 30 July 1994.
Kraemer was at two camps, Buderich and Rheinberg.

14. Grasett to Smith, June 1945. Box 37, Smith Papers, Carlisle
Barracks, PA.

15. Letters from ex-prisoners on file with author.

16. F. Roy Willis, The French in Germany, p. 115.

17. The estimates for the total of Germans subject to expulsion varies,
but De Zayas has settled on 16.6 million in all categories, including
stay-at-homes, dead during flight, and living arrivals. See De
Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam. It is highly likely that the death rate
among the stay-at-homes during 1945- 50 was far above normal.
For example, the figure accepted in 1947 by the (Allied) Council
of Foreign Ministers meeting was 400,000 Germans still living

in ex-German territory held by Poland. In fact, the Canadian
Charge d' Affaires in Warsaw, K. P. Kirkwood, reported to Ottawa
on 28 January 1949 that only 289,000 Germans remained. That
is 28% fewer people than formerly believed. RG 25, Vol. 57A,
File7-CA-14,NAC

18. Emigration was forbidden for most of the period 1945- 50. By
1950, around 600,000 had been permitted to emigrate, accord-
ing to estimates of the Statistisches Bundesamt, Wiesbaden. The
USA and Canada were the top destinations for Germans once
emigration was permitted after 1950, but a cursory check of US
and Canadian immigration figures for the period shows that this
600,000 estimate is far too high. One effect of an excessive esti-
mate is to reduce the number of Germans missing/not accounted
for in the 1950 Census. See Note 28, Chapter VI.

19. Stolper, op. cit.

20. See John Gimbel, Science, Technology and Reparations; also
Michael Balfour and John Mair, Four-power Control in Germany
and Austria; also Tomberg, Report on Economic Conditions in
Germany for 1948, RG 25, Vol. 3807, NAC.

2 1 . Economic Directorate of Allied Control Authority, Food and
Agricultural Co-ordinating Committee paper, 24 July 1946,
PRO FO 943/147. Quoted in Farquharson, op. cit, p. 257.

22. De Zayas, op. cit., p. 8.

23. Ibid., p. 10.

24. Robert Greer, 'Letter from Berlin' in Reading, February 1946,
pp. 27-8. Robert Greer is the pseudonym for Robert Greer
Allen, then a lieutenant in the Canadian Army seconded to the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Germany in 1945. He
became a distinguished producer and administrator for CBC
TV, Toronto. His article was adapted from a letter to his wife.

25. Johannes Kaps (ed.), The Tragedy of Silesia, 1945-1946, p. 189.

26. Theodor Schieder (ed.), 'The Expulsion of the German Popula-
tion from Czechoslovakia' in Documents on the Expulsions of
the Germans from Eastern Central Europe, Vol. IV, p. 459.

27. Ibid., pp. 453 et seq.

28. Ibid., pp. 399- 409.

29. Ibid., p. 431.

30. Ibid., p. 449.

31. Ibid., p. 449.

32. Kaps, op. cit., p. 189.

33. Ibid., p. 195.

34. Ibid., p. 223.

35. Ibid., p. 228.

36. Hugo Rasmus, Schattenj ahre in Potulitz, p. 55.

37. Interview with Dr Martha Kent, Phoenix, 1997.

38. Letter from Dr Kent; see also Rasmus, op. cit.

39. Rasmus, op. cit., p. 151.

40. Ibid., p. 189.

41. Kaps, op. cit., p. 324-

42. Ibid., pp. 526 et seq.

43. Solzhenitsyn, Prussian Nights, translated by Robert
Conquest, p. 39.

Chapter 6 : Death and Transfiguration

1. Konrad Adenauer, Memoirs, 1945- 1953, translated by Beate
Ruhm von Oppen, p. 148.

2. Health and Medical Affairs, MG Report, December 1947. In
Behnke Papers, HIA.

3. Census and mortality reports of Statistisches Bundesamt,
Wiesbaden.

4. Health and Medical Affairs, Military Governor's Report, p. 10,
December 1947. In Behnke Papers, op. cit.

5. Brian R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics. Mitchell has
reported his German sources to be either the UN Yearbook or the
Statistisches Bundesamt.

6. See Bacque, Other Losses, Epilogue One.

7. Lucius Clay, The Papers of General Lucius D. Clay, p. 97.

8. Resolution by the German Physicians, Briiggen, in Behnke Papers.

9. Gustav Stolper, German Realities, p. 31.

10. If the predicted 2.5 million did die in the Soviet zone in the six
months to spring 1946, the death rate for the period would be
135%%. This is more than ten times the pre-war rate for Germany.

1 1 . Statistiches Bundesamt, Bevolkerung und Kultur, Reihe 2:
Natiirliche Bevolkerungsbewegung, p. 33. Also Statistisches
Bundesamt, Bevolkerung und Wirtschaft, 1872-1972, p. 90.

12. When asked in October 1994 for his published source for the
death rate, Mitchell replied that he was unable to say whether it
was the UN Yearbook or the Statistisches Bundesamt. He agreed
that the primary source was probably the Allied Control Council.
It was in this correspondence that he expressed his reservations
about the official death rate'.

13. Statistisches Bundesamt, Bevolkerung und Wirtschaft, 1872-
1972, p. 90, gives 12.2 per thousand per year, and Natiirliche
Bevolkerungsbewegung, p. 33, gives 12.1.

14. Alfred de Zayas saw this letter in the ICRC archives in Geneva
when he was doing research for a book. He asked for permission
to photocopy the letter, which was refused. The ICRC has several
times refused entry to the present author to their archives, on the
grounds that they never open their archives to writers. Not only
has De Zayas been given permission, but also two other writers.

15. Council of Foreign Ministers Meeting, Moscow, April 1947. In
Murphy Papers, HIA.

16. Johannes Kaps (ed.), The Tragedy of Silesia, 1945- 1946, p. 224.

17. Ibid., p. 237.

18. Ibid., p. 252.

19. Ibid., p. 276.

20. Ibid., pp. 403- 12.

21. Ibid., p. 443.

22. Konrad Adenauer, Memoirs, 1945- 1953, p. 48. Adenauer gives
a lower figure for expellee arrivals than appears elsewhere in the
present work because he was speaking in March 1949, whereas
the cut-off date used for expellees in this work is September 1950.
In the years 1949-50, at least 600,000 more expellees arrived.

23. The prisoners returned in the period numbered as follows:

1 .4 million from the Americans (Report on Estimated Strength
of DEF/POWs, October 1945-June 1946), inclusive, in HQ, USFET,

Gl, Weekly PW and DEF reports and inserted at 2 November
1945, Modern Military Records, NARS Washington, plus
375,000 in camps in USA;

0.2 million from small eastern countries (Maschke, Die deut-
schen Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, op. cit);

0.8 million from the British (Maschke, op. cit);

0.9 million from the French (Buisson, Historique du service
des prisonniers de guerre de I 'Axe, Appendix IV. He says the
French had about 0.85 million at the end of 1945, but as has
been demonstrated in Bacque, Other Losses, Buisson under-
reported the intake of prisoners by at least 100,000 and over-
reported the number the French returned to the Americans);

1.5 million from the Soviets (Kashirin, Spravka, op. cit.; and
Galitski, German POWs and the NKVD, op. cit.), as follows:
2.7 million total capture, 800,000 released in 1945, 400,000
dead to Jan 1946.

24. Monthly Report of the Control Commission (British Element),
June 1947. In RG 25, Volume 3809, Dossier 8380-C-40 seq,

NAC.

25. Ambassador Murphy, CFM Prep, papers, 1947, HIA.

26. The source for this is the Murphy Papers, including the Coun-
cil of Foreign Ministers papers at Stanford. Many authorities

in Germany and elsewhere have written about the expellees, but
there is no record at the HIA of any scholar having published
these figures of Murphy's before. This lack of a publication
record may mean little, because a scholar may in fact have used
some of these figures without notifying Hoover. Courtesy of
Ron Bulatoff, HIA, October 1994. These papers were declassi-
fied in several bunches, beginning in 1988. Others were declas-
sified in 1991 by the State Department.

These papers include documents prepared for and presented
at the Council of Foreign Ministers meetings in Moscow and
elsewhere, from 1947 to 1949. They are based on statistics
gathered by the ruling interzonal agency operating in Germany
at the time, the Allied Control Council, under the aegis of the
several Military Governments. Murphy states in April 1947
(CFM Papers, 9 April 1947, Statement by US Delegate, Box 61,
Murphy Papers, HIA) that 5 to 6 million refugees had arrived.
Since all other population figures in these papers are based on
the census of October 1 946, we can be sure that this figure is
also for that date. The French delegate in the Moscow meeting
said on 17 March 1947 that only 4 to 5 million had arrived.

Murphy's assistant Brad Patterson stated on 18 May 1949 that
12 million had arrived (Murphy Papers, Box 67, file 67-6). The
figure usually accepted by all authorities for the total arrivals in
1950 is 12 million. (The effect on the death estimates in this
book of accepting the 12 million figure for May 1949 as valid
for the final total of deaths in 1950 is nil.) This means that
according to the Americans, between 6 and 7 million expellees
arrived between October 1946 and May 1949. Since arrivals of
6 million are conservative in the sense of implying the fewest
deaths, this is the figure I use in this book. If the French start
figure is accepted, then some 500,000 to 1,500,000 more Ger-
mans arrived in the period October 1946-September 1950. This
would increase deaths by the amounts shown. The American
figure is largely confirmed by figures obtained from the Polish
government by the Canadian Charge d' Affaires in Warsaw in
January 1949, showing that only 289,000 Germans remained in
the new Polish territories, of the original 7,400,000. 1 have
accepted only the most authoritative papers, the US State
Department CFM collection, and from them, the number of
arrivals demonstrating the fewest possible deaths. Therefore for
the purposes of this book, the expellee arrivals in 1946- 50
totalled 6 million. The British author Malcolm Proudfoot said
that at July 1946, some 7.4 million expellees had arrived,
leaving some 5 million still to come of the 12.4 million which
he says arrived by 1950. Allowing arrivals of 1 million from
July to October 1946, we see that Proudfoot was estimating in
this (census) 1946- 50 period an influx of some 4 million
expellees. Proudfoot was writing long before the authoritative
CFM papers were available to authors, so the sources on which
he depended were not the best. For instance, in presenting
population figures for 1946 in Table 40, Proudfoot does not
refer to the census of October 1946. It appears that the figures in
this census were not known to him, although the 1950 census
was. For the crucial figure of expellee arrivals in January 1946
in his Table 40, he relies on an estimate made by a German
author, Kornrumpf, without so specifying. This figure first
appears on p. 371, properly identified as an estimate, then
reappears in the Table without being identified as an estimate.
In the Table, it is cited beside the census figures of 1950, as
if they are of equal authority. This implied equality of authority
is clearly in error. The effect of accepting Proudfoot's estimates
would be to reduce the estimated deaths of residents by 2 mil-
lion, viz from 5.9 million to 3.9 million.

27. Total 2,643,525 rounded to 2,600,000 as follows:

For the Americans, 333,525, as follows: Disarmament and
Disbandment of the German Armed Forces, Office of the Chief
Historian, European Command, Frankfurt, 1947, in Center for
Military History, US Army, Washington. Courtesy of Dr Ernest
F. Fisher. (The figure of 250 prisoners held in the USA that
appears in this document has been augmented by the author to
50,000 from information in the Patterson Papers, LC, showing
that President Truman ordered that this number be held in the
USA to help with the 1946 harvest. This harvest was still in
progress in September, when the prisoners would have had to
have been on board ship home to have been included in the
October census. Should further research reveal that some or all
of these 50,000 had been liberated before October 1956, their
number should be subtracted from the eventual death total of
German civilians shown in this book.)

For the Soviets, Statement of Soviet Delegate to CFM
Conference that in March 1947 there were 890,000 Germans
still imprisoned in the USSR. CFM Papers. The present author
estimates that there were 1,100,000 on hand in October 1946,
less author's estimate of deaths before release 1946-50, based
on Kashirin, Spravka, op. cit, and the Kruglov Report, 1 July
1945, in CSSA; and Bulanov Report, op. cit.

For the French, 657,000 (November 1946), less 57,000
estimated deaths 1946-50: in Buisson, op. cit.

For the British, 510,000: from UK Delegate to the CFM mee-
ting, March 1947, plus Griffith to McCahon, September 1946 et
seq., US State Department Central Decimal File F11.621 14/12—
145 to 3146. The total on hand at March 1947 was 435,000, to
which must be added those repatriated from October 1946 to
March 1947. This total was 75,000, because repatriations had
been running at the rate of 15,000 per month for five months.
See also The Times, 22 August 1946, and Hansard, 16 July 1946
p. 180, for total of prisoners on hand at 30 June 1946 (518,000).

Plus 200,000 prisoners on hand in Yugoslavia, Poland, and
the Benelux countries, being 235,000 on hand less estimated
35,000 deaths. From Maschke, op. cit. It has been disputed that
all the arriving prisoners should be added to the potential
population as of the 1950 census. See Appendix 8.

28. Deaths and emigrants from Statistisches Bundesamt, Wies-
baden. The emigration figures (ca 600,000) given by the West
German government are incredibly high. For nearly all the

relevant period, emigration was forbidden. When it did begin,
the destination countries put Germans at the bottom of the list
of acceptables. There are strong conflicts between the figures
given out by Wiesbaden and the figures for two of the most
popular destinations for German Hmigras, Canada and the US.
For 1946-50, the arrivals in Canada according to the West Ger-
man government were 86,900, but according to the authorita-
tive book The German-Canadian Mosaic Today and Yesterday
by Gerhard Bassler, only some 24,000 Germans arrived in
Canada. Similarly American government figures show arrivals
of 219,742 (Historical Statistics of the US, Washington, 1975)
whereas the German government says emigres totalled 401,700.
This is still another example of the fact that statistics issued by
the German government on subjects connected to Allied
atrocities usually err, and the error usually masks the atrocity.
If it is true that the West German government figures are far
too high, to reduce them to the correct level would increase the
number of deaths in 1946- 50. In order to err on the side of
caution, I have used but do not believe the figure of 600,000
emigrants given by the German government.

29. Murphy Papers, op. cit. The American authority making most
decisions affecting interpretation of these statistics was the
US State Department, which in effect meant Robert Murphy.
Murphy's major concern, as it was for all the Allies, was to
analyze the effect of the population changes in Germany. He
was especially interested in the ratio of agricultural land to
numbers of people. However, Murphy appears to give two
slightly different population figures for Germany at October
1946 which differ by 200,000, or 0.3%. They are 65,200,000
and 65,000,000. The ACC census itself, as reproduced in the
Military Governor's Reports for March 1947 (OMGUS Papers,
NARS), shows that the total population was 65,91 1,180. There
were two sub-totals: the German civil authorities reported a
total of 64,778,202 German civilians, and the Allies reported a
further 1,132,978 people under their direct control including
three categories - Prisoners of War in camps in Germany; non-
German Displaced Persons in UNRRA camps (non-German but
provisioned there) and German civilian internees. The non-
German DPs numbered about 700,000 (UNRRA Situation
Report, 31 October 1946, cited in Murphy). These he substrac-
ted from the 65,900,000 (rounded) saying there were then left
'65,200,000 inhabitants'. But when he took a base figure for
population in order to calculate future changes including ad-

ditions of returning POWs, he assumed there were 65,000,000.
Why did Murphy subtract an additional 200,000 unspecified
people? It is reasonable to assume that these 200,000 people
were the German POWs and civil internees known to be present
in Germany in Allied hands (and therefore in the Allied part of
the census total), who were destined to return to the population
in the next three years. Since Murphy was already including
them in his calculations as new additions soon to come to the
population, he did not include them as part of the original
population. He was being careful to avoid double counting.
This accounts for 900,000 of the 1,132,978 people shown
under the category 'Population Registered by Occupation
Authorities'. Neither the census nor Murphy says who those
232,978 people were. However, Murphy did not regard them as
German, so they may have been Allied soldiers and civilians in
the Military Government, who were counted alongside
Germans, because they were being provisioned from German
sources.

30. Statistisches Bundesamt, op. cit., p. 33. With thanks to Annette
Roser. Also Mitchell, International Historical Statistics, op. cit.,
pp. 102, 109.

31. Statistisches Bundesamt, op. cit., and Mitchell, op. cit. The UN
Yearbook 1956 reports that for the period of the four calendar
years 1947 through to 1950, total deaths recorded in all zones
werec. 3,297,194-

32. See Bundesamt fur Auswanderung, Tdtigkeitsbericht der
Bundesstelle fur das Auswanderungswesen, Bremen, 1951.

33. UN Yearbook 1956. The census for the eastern zone was taken
under Soviet supervision at 31 August 1950 and the census for
the west under British, French and American supervision at 13
September 1950. Both 1946 and 1950 totals exclude the Saar.
Proudfoot says 68,794,000, but may include some non-German
DPs.

34. The delegates to the various CFM meetings sometimes disagree
with each other as to the number of arrivals at various dates
between 1946 and 1950, but they all agree with each other that
the total of arrivals was around 12 million in August-Septem-
ber 1950, which has become the figure accepted by the West
German government. See De Zayas, Proudfoot and others.

35. Report of Town of Brilon, 24 April 1946. In MG 31 B 51,
Friesen, GA- 1945/46, NAC.

36. See Appendix 5 for details of Marktoberdorf .

37. Press release by HQ US Forces in Austria, 15 April 1946, re:
Clark's interview with Hoover. General Clark believed that in
the US zone, health standards remained above the standard in
Vienna. But he also warned that 'the supplies turned over to
UNRRA are estimated to maintain the existing 1,200 calorie
ration scale throughout all of Austria until about 1 June 1946',
when it would be necessary for the Austrians to feed them-
selves, except for what UNRRA could bring in. He estimated
the indigenous sources at 450 calories per day. In FEC Papers,
Box 16,HIA.

38. Report on Economic Conditions in Germany especially the
Bizone for 1948, by Dr W. Tomberg. In RG 25, Vol 3807, NAC.

39. Gabriele Stuber, Der Kampf gegen den Hunger, 1945- 1950,
p. 810.

40. Chief Medical Officer of the Allied Expeditionary Force/Chief
Surgeon of the ETO: Report, entitled 'The Disease Potential in
Germany', p. 21. FEC Papers, Box 4, HIA.

41 . See Hoover, The President's Economic Mission to Germany and
Austria.

42. Murphy to State, 20 February 1947, Memorandum No. 90,

re: Polish Administered German Area, in Council of Foreign
Ministers preparatory papers for CFM meeting, April 1947,
Box 61, Murphy Papers.

43. See Appendix 1 .

44. De Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, p. xxv.

45. Figures published by the Polish government, reported in the
Minutes of the CFM Apr. 9 1947. In Murphy Papers, Sept. 1947.

46. Theodor Schieder (ed.), Documents on the Expulsions of the
Germans from Eastern Central Europe, Vol IV, p. 128.

47. See population trees in Stolper, op. cit, pp. 26-30. About 56%
of the German population in 1946 were females. In populations
undamaged by war, females slightly outnumber males. The
number of men between 20 and 50 was 9.6 million in 1950, or
about 20% of the population. Since young men normally die at
a very low rate in peacetime, it is reasonable to conclude that
over 80% of the deaths occurred among women, children and
old men.

48. The figure was actually far higher. See Appendix 2.

49. The highest estimates for the three wartime causes is given in
Martin Sorge, The Other Price of Hitler's War, around
4,600,000. Other authorities place the figure much lower, e.g.

around 2.3 million in John Ellis, World War Two: A Statistical
Survey. The death rate for Germans including prisoners and
expellees during this period was around 29 per thousand per
year, while in other areas ravaged by the German attacks, such
as Hungary and Poland, the rate was less than half that.

50. See Appendix 2.

51. Patterson to Marshall, 13 June 1947, Patterson Papers, Library
of Congress.

52. Heinrich von Treitschke, History of Germany in the Nineteenth
Century, Vol. I, quoted in Stolper, op. cit., p. 231.

53. See Hoover, An American Epic, Vol IV.

54. During the war approximately 3.8 million Germans died in the
armed forces, another 500,000 in air raids and about 300,000 in
Hitler's concentration camps. Sorge, op. cit., p. 67.

55. Peter Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, p. 16.
These are overall figures including imprisonment based only
on suspicion, and imprisonments based on judicial process.
Some police arrest figures that probably include some imprison-
ments in the latter category appear in Detlev J. K. Peukert,
Inside Nazi Germany.

56. James Taylor and Warren Shaw, A Dictionary of the Third
Reich, p. 78.

57. The Dulles and Roosevelt quotes are from Peter Grose, Gentle-
man Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1994), pp. 202-3.

58. Niemoller was later used by the British to propagandize or
re-educate German prisoners in the UK.

59. Patricia Meehan, The Unnecessary War, p. 376.

60. Hansard, Series 5, Vol. 402, 2 August 1944, col. 1487. Quoted
in Peter Hoffmann, The Question of Western Allied Co-opera-
tion with the German Anti-Nazi Conspiracy, 1938- 1944' in
The Historical Journal, No. 34, 1991, pp. 463- 4.

61. Foreign Office Papers 371/39062, C 9896. Quoted in Martin
Gilbert, The Road to Victory, p. 868.

62. I am indebted to Professor Pierre van den Berghe of Seattle for
this passage about the German communist and socialist resis-
tance.

63. Interview with Dr Raabe, March 1992.

64. Interview with Robert Kreider, in North Newton, Kansas,
September 1994. Kreider was the MCC representative on

CRALOG (Council of Relief Agencies Licensed to Operate in
Germany).

65. Hoover, An American Epic, op. cit, pp. 101, 116; and The
Columbia Encyclopedia.

66. The quotation is from a speech by Senator Capehart, 5 February
1946, in the CRS, p. 876.

67. The author has encountered several cases of such suppression.
The farmer Otto Tullius of Bretzenheim, Germany, has dug on
his own land to find traces of prisoners formerly held there
when the land was used for an American and then a French
prison camp. He was ordered to stop by the police under threat
of a fine of 250,000 Deutschmarks. Interview with Otto Tullius,
Bretzenheim, June 1 99 1 .

In Rheinberg, a young farmer, Martin Adams, together with
his father worked the land of the former US prison camp, dis-
covering human bones 'probably from the prison camp era'.
According to Lotte Borgmann of Rheinberg and the town
archivist H. Janssen, the police said that the bones had been
buried in 'the old Jewish cemetery' at that location. Both Mrs
Borgmann and Herr Janssen have said that the 'old Jewish
cemetery' was nowhere near the camp. Martin Adams and his
father ended up reburying the bones. In this and other instances,
the news of the discovery of the bones was sent to the official
German tracing agency WASt (a.k.a. Die Deutsche Dienststelle)
in Berlin. The author has been unable to discover from the
agency evidence of any further investigations. Apparently the
news was reburied. At Lambach in Austria, recent discoveries
of bones have provoked a controversy over their origins which
may be a cover-up of POW deaths in US camps nearby.

An exception was the case of Hechtsheim near Mainz, where
bones uncovered during highway building were identified as
Hungarian.

From the Tullius case, it is clear that the police threat of an
enormous fine is enough to deter most if not all investigators.

Chapter 7 : The Victory of the Merciful

1. Attorney General William D. Mitchell to Herbert Hoover, at page
F-12 of typeset manuscript by Hoover reporting on relief activities
during 1939-40 and after, in FEC Papers, HIA.

2. Hoover, An American Epic, Vol. IV, p. 84.

3. Ibid., p. 106.

4. Ibid., p. 87.

5. Ibid., p. 116.

6. Calculation is based on world population estimate of around two
billion in 1939 (this is deliberately estimated low, which means
that given a higher 1939 population total, there would be more
food available per capita post-war than is shown here). One per
cent of production sufficient for 2 billion people equals suf-
ficiency for 20 million. This sufficient consumption pre-war

is estimated by the author to be 2,000cpd, and shortfall for
Germans at 800cpd (1,200 vs 2,000). Thus 2,000 x 20 million
cpd translates to 800cpd for 50 million.

7. Hoover, op. cit., p. 177.

8. Patterson Papers, LC, Washington. For a succinct summary of the
situation showing that others agreed with Patterson, see Office of
Foreign Agricultural Relations, Report, October 1946, quoted in
John C. Campbell, The United States in World Affairs , 1945-1947,
p. 323.

9. See Hoover, Addresses Upon the American Road.

10. Notes made by Secretary of War Robert Patterson after Cabinet
meeting 29 March 1946. Patterson Papers, LC.

1 1 . Patterson to Truman, 20 November 1946, Patterson Papers, LC.

12. Patterson to Marshall, 13 June 1947, Patterson Papers, LC.

13. Mackenzie King, Diaries, p. 878 (14 September 1945). NAC,
MG26J13.

14. The Canadian price was 30% below current market price in 1946.
By 1947, it was predicted, the world price would go to $2.25 per
bushel, 50% more than Canada was charging the UK. From J. E.
Farquharson, The Western Allies and the Politics of Food,

pp. 103-4.

15. Norman Robertson to Mackenzie King, 17 February 1946,
CI 8870 1-3, King Papers, NAC.

16. Patterson to Truman, FEC Papers, Box 26, HIA.

17. Patterson to Truman, 8 July 1946, FEC Papers, Box 26, HIA.

18. In 1946, Hon. Thomas Jenkins reported in the US Congress that
Hoover had already reduced the food shortfall from an estimated

1 1,000,000 tons to about 3,000,000 tons, which Hoover believed
would fall by a further possible 1,500,000 tons. CRS, Vol. 92, Pt 4,
pp. 5051-5.

19. Richard Norton Smith, An Uncommon Man, p. 359.

20. Hoover, from a speech in Ottawa quoted in An American Epic,
Vol. IV, pp. 219-220. See also Gabriele Stuber, Der Kampf
gegen den Hunger, for figures in the British zone, pp. 285-7.
For figures on TB, see Stuber, p. 297.

21 . King, Diaries, 28 June 1946, p. 599, NAC, MG 26 Jl 3.

22. Gabriele Stuber, quoting from NAC External; 8376 K- 40, C
Cypher No. 55, 9 May 1946, NAC. In Zeitschrift der Gesell-
schaftfur Kanada-Studien, p. 41 .

23. Memorandum for files, 22 December 1946, Patterson Papers,
LC.

24. See Bacque, Other Losses, Chapters III - IV.

25. Morgenthau Diary (China), Vol. 2, pp. 1529ff For a fuller
account, see Bacque, Other Losses, p. 83.

26. Patterson to Marshall, 13 June 1947, Patterson Papers, LC.

27. Stuber, Der Kampf gegen den Hunger, pp. 55ff

28. Dr Frank D. Graham and Lt. Col. J. J. Scanlon, 'Economic
Preparation and Conduct of War Under the Nazi Regime',
10 April 1946, Box 20, Patterson Papers, LC.

29. F. S. V. Donnison, Civil Affairs and Military Government,
p. 340.

30. A. E. Grasett to Chief of Staff, W. B. Smith, 8 June 1945. Smith
Papers, Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA.

31. John C. Campbell, The United States in World Affairs, p. 323.

32. The National Food Situation, pamphlet of the Bureau of
Agricultural Economics, US Department of Agriculture, January
1946, FEC Papers, Box 9, HIA. Also resume of meeting chaired
by Dr FitzGerald, a Director, US Department of Agriculture, in his
office, to give details to reporters of world food situation,

20 February 1946. Resume in FEC Papers, HIA.

33. World Food Situation 1946, US Department of Agriculture,
Washington DC. In FEC Papers, Box 25, HIA.

34. UN Report, Washington, 26 December 1946. Copy in FEC
Papers, HIA.

35. USDA pamphlet and resume.

36. Patterson to Byrnes, 27 December 1944. Also part-manuscript
and notes of proposed book by Patterson, never published.
These documents were declassified for this book in 1992.

37. Hoover, Introduction to Food, Relief Famine and the Economic
Front in World War Two, FEC Papers, HIA.

38. Foreign Office Paper, 9 July 1947, microfilmed in NAC, Ottawa at
8376-K-40C, PRO, London. Murphy estimated 'about l,700cpd'.

39. Grasett to Chief of Staff (General W. B. Smith), 8 June 1 945.
Box 37, W. B. Smith Collection, Army War College, Carlisle
Barracks, PA.

40. Foreign Office Paper, 9 July 1947, File 8376-K-40C, Vol. XXX;
also M. S. Szymczak, Our Stake in German Economic Recovery,
Federal Reserve Bulletin, July 1947, p. 681. Copy found by
author in FEC Papers, Box 2, HIA; also Hoover, The President's
Economic Mission to Germany and Austria, op. cit. General Clay
said {Decision in Germany, p. 265, quoted in Balfour, op. cit., p. 14)
that the pre-war production in the western zones would have pro-
vided only 1,100 cpd. If he meant l,100cpd for the pre-war popula-
tion, this figure was not correct. This is shown by the production
actually achieved under much worse circumstances in 1945,
according to Hoover.

4 1 . Foreign Office Paper, 9 July 1 947, File 8376-K-40C, Vol. XXX.

42. CFM Papers, 61-62 File, Box 61, HIA.

43. See Michael Balfour and John Mair, Four-power Control in
Germany and Austria.

44. See Balfour and Mair, op. cit., and Donnison, op. cit.

45. Szymczak, op. cit, p. 684, and Donnison, op. cit., among others.

46. Balfour and Mair, op. cit., pp. 12ff

47. Szymczak, op. cit., p. 685.

48. Hoover, An American Epic, Vol. IV, p. 241-

49. F. Roy Willis, The French in Germany, p. 124- John Gimbel points
out that General Marshall misled, or lied to, Molotov when he
stated that the US reparations amounted to only about $275
million of which most was external assets. Direct 'removals' from
within Germany were only about $10,000,000, Marshall said.
Gimbel comments: Any evaluation approaching the truth would
undoubedly have been embarrassing to Marshall ... for it would
have revealed how distorted, misleading and propagandistic the
statement released in Moscow had been.' According to Gimbel the
US took about $5 billion and the British the same. The sum of
$10 billion in today's terms, allowing for inflation and the growth
of the economies involved, would be far above $200 billion. John
Gimbel, Science, Technology and Reparations, Chapter VIII.

50. Interview with Peter and Elfrieda Dyck, September 1994.

5 1 . ICRC President (Interim) Max Huber, to State, 30 August 1945.
In 800.142/9-2745, State Department Archives, Washington.

52. Huber, op. cit. Thousands of train-car loads were returned. See
also letter of E. L. Maag, ICRC Delegate to Canada, to Minister
for External Affairs, Ottawa, 17 April 1945, in RG 25 Vol. 3400
621MZ40CNAC.

53. Stuber, Der Kampf gegen den Hunger, p. 442.

54. Malcolm Proudfoot, European Refugees, Table 40. There is a
conflict between Proudfoot and official British army reports of
refugees at that date, for which see Chapter V. The difference
between the British report and Proudfoot is 400,000, but it is not
clear how much of the difference can be attributed to the year
1946, which is the year in question here.

55. Donnison, op. cit., p. 335; civilians in Westphalia had l,040cpd
in 1945; see Report on Economic Conditions in Germany,
especially the Bizone, for 1948, by Dr. W. Tomberg; in RG 25,
Vol. 3807, NAC. Also Stuber, op. cit, p. 810.

56. Stuber, op. cit., p. 463.

57. Relief dates from Robert Kreider, Mennonite Member of the
CRALOG, interview, September 1994.

58. It officially began on 19 February 1946, with at first eleven and
later sixteen member organizations (Mitgliedsverbdnde) of
American welfare agencies (Wohlfahrtspflege). But it was not
really until autumn 1946 that the necessary aid was sent to
Germany.

59. Stuber, Die Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft fur Kanada-Studien, p. 42.

60. Hoover, An American Epic, Vol. IV, pp. 162-3.

61. Patterson to Anderson, 5 May 1947, Patterson Papers, LC.

62. Patterson to Marshall, 13 June 1947, Patterson Papers, LC.

63. This was in the spring of 1946. Hoover, op. cit., p. 164.

64. Quoted by Stuber in Der Kampf gegen den Hunger, pp. 523-4,
from the files of the Kieler Stadtmission.

65. Col. G. W. McPherson in Berlin, 19 March 1946, to Norman
Robertson, Ottawa. In RG 24, Vol. 5717, NAC.

66. United Nations, World Food Appraisal for 1946-1947, Washing-
ton, 26 December 1946.

67. King, Diaries, 4 August 1946, p. 700, NAC.

68. Notes of Cabinet Meeting, 29 March 1946, by Robert Patterson.
Patterson Papers, LC.

69. Stuber, op. cit., p. 763.

70. Quoted in John Unruh, In the Name of Christ, p. 146.

7 1 . Quoted in Stuber article in Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft fur
Kanada-Studien, p. 48.

72. Unruh, op. cit., p. 147.

73. Ibid., p. 149. This number was later increased to 5,400: see
Stuber, Der Kampf gegen den Hunger, p. 537.

74. Stuber, op. cit., p. 400.

75. Unruh, op. cit., p. 151.

76. In June 1947 the Danish Red Cross co-ordinated with the
'Hoover-Spende' in a feeding program for 66,500 schoolchildren
in Schleswig-Holstein, which included approximately seventeen
areas (Gebiete) and cities (Staedte). Stuber, op. cit., p. 502.

77. Proudfoot, European Refugees, pp. 186-8.

78. See Bacque, Other Losses, Chapter VI.

79. See Twenty-five Silver Years 1939-1964, pamphlet published
by the Irish Red Cross Society, pp. 11, 12. Archives of the Irish
Red Cross, Dublin.

80. Stuber, op. cit., p. 571.

81. Herr Korschner's note in the Stadtarchiv Bonn 'Schulkinderspei-
sung', kindly supplied by Annaliese Barbara Baum of Bonn.

82. Stuber, op. cit., p. 576.

83. Interview with Stephen Cary, European Commissioner of the
American Friends Service Committee, November 1986.

84. See Bacque, Other Losses, Chapter VI. Trainloads were refused
at Augsburg and elsewhere. See also ICRC, Report of the
International Committee of the Red Cross on its Activities During
the Second World War, p. 388.

85. ICRC, op. cit, p. 426.

86. Farquharson, The Western Allies and the Politics of Food, p. 92.

87. Unruh, op. cit., p. 152.

88. Paul Nitze, quoted in Gregory A. Fossedal, Our Finest Hour, p. 227.

89. Bevin is quoted in Fossedal, op. cit, p. 240.

90. Ibid., p. 231.

91 . Acheson here paraphrases Joseph Jones and Francis Russell, who
were informed by Will Clayton. In Fossedal, op. cit., p. 221.

92. Hoover, An American Epic, Vol. IV, pp. 165-6.

93. Ibid., p. 163.

94. King Papers, C25 5123, NAC.

95. FEC Papers, Box 23, HI A.

96. Aloys Algen to Hoover, 5 Febr. 1948, FEC Papers, Box 23, HIA.

97. Elfrieda and Peter Dyck, op. cit, pp. 141-3.

98. Quoted in De Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, p. 139.

99. Maurice A. Pope, Memoirs (University of Toronto Press, 1962),
p. 309.

100. De Zayas, op. cit, p. 140.

101. Ibid., p. 139.

102. Gary Dean Best, Herbert Hoover: The Post-Presidential Years,
Vol. II, p. 324. See also Gimbel, op. cit.

103. Report of conversation with A. H. Graubart, Captain US Navy
Intelligence, Berlin, Lochner Reports, FEC Papers.

104. Gimbel, op. cit., p. 134.

105. Ibid., p. 135.

106. Gimbel, 'The American Exploitation of German Technical
Know-how After World War Two' in Political Science Quarterly,
Vol. 105, No. 2, 1990, p. 300.

107. Gimbel, Science, Technology and Reparations, p. 160.

108. Gimbel, The Origins of the Marshall Plan, p. 273. Emphasis in
original.

109. According to the curator David Wigdor in the manuscript
division of the Library of Congress, only one scholar has ever
worked on these papers, a graduate student from Stanford,
whose work has not been published.

110. Recipients' copies of the letters to such figures as Marshall,
Anderson and Truman may have been consulted by scholars in
other archives. However, there is no evidence that the important
memos, which do not exist elsewhere, have ever been used by
scholars until now. Finally, the general tenor of the sections on
food - that the difficulties for Patterson lay in getting 'priority'
or 'fiscal' resources to ship available food - has to the best of my
knowledge never appeared in print before now.

111. Gimbel, The Origins of the Marshall Plan, p. 174.

112. Ibid., p. 174.

113. The dollar figures for the 1945-50 period must be multiplied by
six to seven times for the equivalent in 1997. Felix Rohatyn in
the New York Review of Books, 14 July 1994, p. 49.

114. Martin Gilbert, The Road to Victory, p. 1181.

115. Gimbel, Science, Technology and Reparations, p. 152. He bases
this on a manuscript giving the history of FIAT (Field Informa-
tion Agency, Technical) which he discovered in the archive of
the OMGUS historical office, RG 319 CMH, NARS.

116. Gimbel, The American Exploitation of German Technical
Know-how After World War Two, p. 305.

117. Gimbel, A German Community Under American Occupation,
pp. 126-7.

118. See Voltaire, The Calas Affair: A Treatise on Tolerance.

119. Gimbel, op. cit., pp. Iff

120. Mark Roseman, 'The Uncontrolled Economy' in Reconstruction
in Post-war Germany: British Occupation Policy and the Western
Zones 1945-1955, edited by Ian D. Turner (New York: Berg,
1989), pp. 102ff.

121. Gimbel, op. cit., p. 81.

122. The Tsarist regime, once regarded as the most tyrannous in
Europe, had on average 94,769 prisoners both political and
criminal in its notorious jails in 1881. The population then was
around 104 million. This was a particularly bad year for the
Russians, because Tsar Alexander II had just been assassinated,
and the country was swarming with revolutionary movements.

The United States in the latest year reported, 1992, when there
were no international or internal revolutionary threats, had
slightly over 1,225,000 people behind bars, i.e. four times as
many per capita as Tsarist Russia in one of its most violent years.
The United States has today more people per capita behind bars
than Nazi Germany had in 1939, when there were approximately
125,000 criminals on average in German conventional jails.
This was also a particularly dangerous year for the Germans: one
of their senior officials abroad had recently been assassinated,
there were plots against the life of the Chancellor, war was anti-
cipated. The Gestapo had in 1936 around 6,000 prisoners in
three camps; in April 1939, they had 162,739 persons in six
concentration camps including Buchenwald and Dachau, in
'protective custody', who were mainly political prisoners.
Whether the German figure is from 1936 or 1939, the Americans
today still have more prisoners per capita than Nazi Germany in
peacetime.

Statistics are blind to the horrors of Nazi racial policies, which
have no counterpart in the US. But it must also be remembered

that the American prison population has a disproportionate
number of blacks, hispanics and native/aborigines whose lea-
ders have been saying for many years that they are the victims
of systemic discrimination, leading to increased death rates in
their barrios, ghettoes and reservations, and also to higher rates
of incarceration and longer sentences for crimes than whites
receive for similar offences.

For Russia: The Ministry of Internal Affairs: A Historical
Review, 1802-1902 (St Petersburg: Printer of the Ministry of the
Interior, 1902), p. 135.

Russian population estimate of 104 million is pro-rated from
1858 census of 74 million compared with 1897 census of 125
million. Russian population figures from (1858) Encyclopedic
Dictionary of F. A. Brockhaus and I. A. Efiron, St Petersburg,
1899, Volume 27A, p. 75. And 1897 from T. Shamn, Russia as
a Developing Society (New Haven: Yale, 1986). With thanks to
Martin Reesink.

The German figures are from Professor Peter Hoffmann and
from a professor who has asked not to be named, who says
there were approximately 6,500 political prisoners in KZL
(concentration camps) in 1936, apart from the criminals in
conventional jails. The Gestapo policy varied considerably,
becoming much more repressive through denunciations from
1936 on, so an average from 1936-39 would be appropriate.

Re autumn 1939: Professors J. Noakes and G. Pridham in their
book Nazism 1919-1945 (New York: Schocken, 1988), have
estimated that there were only 25,000 people imprisoned in
September 1939, in the same six concentration camps (p. 520,
Vol. II). The Report by the Chief of the SS Economic and
Administrative Main Office of 30 April 1942 showed that there
were 21,400 prisoners in the same six camps at September 1939.
Trial of the Major War Criminals, p. 363.

Re spring 1939 figures from Gunther Wiesenborn: DerLaut-
lose Auf stand. Bericht uber die Widerstandsbewegung des
deutschen Volkes 1933-1945, p. 30. Quoted in Peter Hoffmann,
The History of the German Resistance, pp. 15-16. On p. 16, line
10, of Hoffmann, please note that 'sentence' should read 'indict-
ment'.

The average influx into political imprisonment was 37,500
persons per year from 1933 to 1939.

Chapter 8 : History of Forgetting

1 . Klaus Schwabe, Woodrow Wilson, Revolutionary Germany and
Peacemaking 1918-1919 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press), p. 89.

2. Joseph Tumulty to Wilson: Arthur Walworth, Woodrow Wilson
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin), Vol. II, p. 187.

3. See Bischof and Ambrose, Eisenhower and the German POWs.

4. The book making the charge was Hitler's Willing Executioners:
Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Little, Brown,

1 996) by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, which in its first year of
publication had sold 20,000 copies in Britain.

5. Klemens von Kemperer, German Resistance Against Hitler
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 386.

6. Conor Cruise O'Brien, quoting an earlier essay, in his book On
the Eve of the Millennium, p. 141.

7. Murphy to State, 12 October 1945, Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1945, Vol. 2, pp. 1290-2. Quoted in De Zayas,
Nemesis at Potsdam, p. 115. Bertrand Russell in England wrote
strong letters of protest to The Times and the New Leader. De
Zayas, op. cit, pp. 108-9.

8. De Zayas to the author, January 1995.

9. Times Literary Supplement, 14-20 September 1990.

10. New York Times Booh Review, 25 February 1991, p. 1.

1 1 . See Ramsey Clark, The Fire This Time: US War Crimes in the
Gulf.

12. Stanley Kutler, Professor of History and Law, University of
Wisconsin, in the New Yorker, 14 December 1992, p. 91.

13. David Irving, Goebbels, p. 418.

14. Konrad Adenauer, Memoirs, 1945-1953, p. 148.

15. See Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed; Peter Hellman,
Avenue of the Righteous; and Bacque, Just Raoul.

ie ie ie

Appendices

1. Brian R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics, pp. 102,
109.

2. See Note 27, Chapter VI. The UK figure is also derived from
Murphy Papers, Box 62, HIA, plus Griffith to McCahom,
Sept. 1946 et seq., State Central Decimal File Fl 1.621 14/
12-145 to 3146. State Department Archives, Washington.
Total equals 435,000 at March 1947 and repatriations were
at the rate of 15,000 per month since October meaning that
the original October total must have been 510,000. Also see
The Times, 22 August 1946.

3. The West German government has estimated a death total of
710,000 for the whole year of 1945. The proportion who died
from the beginning of August to the end of December 1945 is
about 296,000. For all of 1946, they officially reported 588,331,
of which some 490,000 occurred in January to October 1946. So
in the whole period August 1945 to October 1946, the official
figure is about 786,000.

4. The 1946 figure is an estimate, according to the Statistisches
Bundesamt.

5. CFM Papers, HIA.

6. Senator Capehart, CRS, 5 February 1946, p. 878.

7. 'Protokoll Zusammenkunft mit President a.D. Hoover', 13 April
1946, Geiler Papers, Staatsarchiv, Wiesbaden, in Gimbel, The
American Occupation of Germany, p. 55.

8. CAME, The Land of the Dead, p. 3 1 .

9. Ibid., p. 32.

10. K. P. Kirkwood, Charge d' Affaires, Warsaw. In RG 25, Vol. 5719,
File7-CA-14,NAC.

11. All from CFM Papers, Murphy Boxes, HIA.

12. It might be thought that Konigsberg, because it was taken over
by the Soviets, is outside our range of investigation, but it must
be remembered that the statistics of deaths among the refugees
who did arrive in the Soviet zone of Germany are mainly esti-
mates, which depend largely on assessing from outside the
Soviet zone, how many refugees remained behind and alive in
the seized territories. And, of course, the statistics from Murphy
and the census comparison all include the statistics for the
Soviet zone.

13. Gabriele Stiiber, Der Kampf gegen den Hunger, p. 285. Minutes
of the meeting are in the Bundesarchiv Bonn 1/253.

14. Vital Statistics, Hansestadt Hamburg, 1938, undated British
Army Report. In FEC Papers, at or near Box 14, HIA.

15. Pope to External, 4 July 1947. External Affairs Records, File
8376-K, NAC.

16. Address by Surgeon-General, Navy Day, 27 October 1947,
Bethesda. In Behnke Papers, Box 1, HIA.

17. Lucius Clay, The Papers of General Lucius D. Clay, p. 96.

18. Red Cross report reproduced in Kurt W. Bohme, Zur Geschichte
der deutschen Kriegsgefangene des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Munich:
Verlag Ernst und Walter Gieseking, 1973), p. 282.

19. The population figures on which the percentages are based
come from the Allied Census in October 1946, quoted in Gustav
Stolper, German Realities, pp. 22ff .

20. Smith in Deutschland zwischen Krieg und Frieden (Bonn: Bundes-
zentrale fur politische Bildung), p. 110.

21 . Archivist Edward Reese, NARS, Washington, to the author in con-
versation, 1987.

22. Taped interview in front of a witness with the author, Munich,
June 1991.

23. See Bohme, Gesucht wird.

24. Ernest F. Fisher Jr., Monte Cassino to the Alps (Washington:
Center for Military History, Department of the Army), p. 485.
Also Charles B. MacDonald, The Last Offensive (same
publisher), p. 464.

25. See Statistisches Jahrbuchfiir die Bundesrepublik Deutschland
(Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1952).

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Maschke, Erich, Die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Welt-
krieges. Eine Zusammenfassung (Munich: Verlag Ernst und Werner
Gieseking, 1974)

McCullough, David, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992)

Meehan, Patricia, The Unnecessary War: Whitehall and the German
Resistance to Hitler (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992)

Mitchell, Brian R. (ed.), International Historical Statistics: Europe
1 750-1988 (third edition-New York: Stockton Press, 1992)

Morgenthau, Henry C., Germany is Our Problem (New York: Harper,
1945)

Murphy, Robert, Diplomat Among Warriors (Garden City, NY: Double-
day, 1964)

Nash, George H., The Life of Herbert Hoover, Vol. 2: The Humanitarian,
1914-1917 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988)

Nicolson, Nigel, Portrait of a Marriage (London: Weidenfeld & Nicol-
son, 1973)

Nimmo, William F., Behind a Curtain of Silence: Japanese in Soviet
Custody 1945-1956 (New York: Greenwood, 1988)

Norbeck, Edward, 'Eddoko: A Narrative of Japanese Prisoners of War
in Russia' in Rice University Studies (Houston, TX), Vol. 57,
No. 1 (Winter 1971), pp. 19-67

O'Brien, Conor Cruise, On the Eve of the Millennium (Concord, Ont. :
Anansi, 1994)

O'Brien, Francis William (ed.), The Hoover-Wilson Wartime Corres-
pondence 24 September 1914 to 11 November 1918 (Ames, JA:
Iowa State University Press, 1974)

— (ed.), Two Peacemakers in Paris: The Hoover-Wilson Post-
Armis tice Letters 1918-1920 (College Station, TX: Texas
A&M University Press, 1978)

Overy, Richard, The Road to War (London: Macmillan, 1989)

Proudfoot, Malcolm, European Refugees 1939-1952: A Study in
Forced Population Movement (London: Faber & Faber, 1957)

Rasmus, Hugo, Schattenjahre in Potulitz 1945 (Minister: Nicolaus-
Copernicus-Verlag, 1995)

Roseman, Mark, 'The Uncontrolled Economy' in Reconstruction in
Post-war Germany: British Occupation Policy and the Western
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Sauermann, Dietmar, and Brockpahler, Renate, Eigentlich wollte ich
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Schenck, Ernst-Gunther, Das Menschliche Elend im 20. Jahrhundert -
Eine Pathographie der Kriegs-, Hunger- und politischen Kata-
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Schieder, Theodor (ed.), The Expulsion of the German Population from the
Territories East of the Oder-Neisse Line, Vols. I - IV (Bonn: Ministry
for Expellees, Refugees and War Victims, 1960- 61) A selection and
translation from Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus
Ost-Mitteleuropa, Band 1/1 und 1/2.

Segschneider, Ernst Helmut (ed.), Jahre im Abseits. Erinnerungen an
die Kriegs gefangenschaft (Bramsche: Rasch, 1991)

Smith, Richard Norton, An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert
Hoover (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984)

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 (transla-
ted by Thomas P. Whitney - New York: Harper & Row, 1974- 76)

— Prussian Nights (translated by Robert Conquest - New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1977)

Sorge, Martin, The Other Price of Hitler's War (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1986)

Statistisches Bundesamt (Wiesbaden), Bevolkerung und Kultur, Reihe
2: Natiirliche Bevolkerungsbewegung (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer,
1966)

— Bevolkerung und Wirtschaft 1872-1972 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlham-
mer, 1972)

Stimson, Henry L, and Bundy, McGeorge, On Active Service in Peace
and War (New York: Harper, 1948)

Stolper, Gustav, German Realities (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock,
1948)

Stiiber, Gabriele, Der Kampf gegen den Hunger 1945-1950. Die
Ernahrungslage in der britischen Zone Deutschlands, insbeson-
dere in Schleswig-Holstein und Hamburg (Neumunster : Karl
Wachholtz, 1984)

— 'Kanadische Deutschlandhilfe in den ersten Jahren nach dem
Zweiten Weltkrieg' in Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft fur Kanada-
Studien, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Neumunster: Karl Wachholtz Verlag,
1986), pp. 39-62

Tolstoy, Nikolai, Victims of Yalta (London: Hodder & Stoughton,
1977)

— The Minister and the Massacres (London: Century, 1986)

Unruh, John D., In the Name of Christ: A History of the Mennonite
Central Committee and its Service 1920-1951 (Scottdale, PA:
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Vogel, Karl, M-AA 509. ElfMonate Kommandant eines Internie-
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Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet, The Calais Affair: A Treatise on
Tolerance (translated and edited by Brian Masters - London:
Folio Society, 1994)

Walch, Timothy, and Miller, Dwight M., Herbert Hoover and Harry
S. Truman: A Documentary History (Worland: High Plains, 1992)

Wherry, Kenneth Spicer, 'Investigation of Starvation Conditions in
Europe' in the Congressional Record of the Senate (microfilm),
Vol. 92, Pts. 1-2 (29 January 1946), pp. 509-20

— 'Investigation of Starvation Conditions in Europe' and 'The
Report of the Economic Committee for Europe': speeches of
Kenneth S. Wherry in the Senate of the United States - 29 Janu-
ary 1946; 1 and 7 February 1946 (Washington: US Government
Printing Office, 1946)

Willis, Edward F. , Herbert Hoover and the Russian Prisoners of
World War I : A Study in Diplomacy and i?e//e/(Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1951)

Wolfe, Robert, Americans as Proconsuls: United States Military

Government in Germany and Japan 1944-1952 (Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1984)

Willis, F. Roy, The French in Germany 1945-1949 (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1962)

Zayas: see under 'de Zayas'

Ziemke, Earl F., The US Army in the Occupation of Germany 1944-
1946 (Washington: Center of Military History, US Army, 1975)

* * *

INDEX

When an in-document search routine can easily find a topic, only the
number of times, each time where a topic starts, is given (i.e. 2x).
Otherwise the page number itself is mentioned (i.e. p. 80), which in
that case refers to the internet edition lying here in front of you.

accounting, false, pp. 64, 167, 183

Acheson, Dean, lx

Adenauer, Konrad, pp. 129, 193;

on Berlin death rate, p. 213;

condemns expulsions, p. 199;

government's surveys missing persons, pp. 99, 101, 144, 206, 221;

as Lord Mayor of Cologne, p. 185;

moderate statistics of, pp. 128, 133-34
Adourian, Alex, lx
agriculture, German:

loss of farmlands, pp. 113, 117;

production, pp. 166,168, 175, 217
Albrecht, Hans, lx
Aldington, Lord (Toby Low), 3x
Algen, Abyus, lx
Allard, Henry W., 2x
Allensworth, John, lx
Allied Control Council, 4x
Alt-Wette (town in Silesia), lx
Ambrose, Stephen E., 4x
American Relief Administration (ARA), 3x
anarchy, p. 190
Andernach, 2x
Anders, Wladyslaw, lx
Anderson, Clinton, 4x
Anglo-Saxon militarism, pp. 50, 68
anti-Semitism, pp. 42, 125
ARA, see American Relief Administration
Arbeiterwohlfahrt, lx
archives, Soviet, see CSSA
archives, Western, pp. 107, 197
Argentina, 4x
Asquith, Herbert, lx
Atlantic Charter, 2x

atomic secrets, lx

Augsburg, lx

Aurich camp, lx

Ausschufi fur Kriegsgefangenenfragen, 3x

Aussig (a ghost town now), lx

Australia, 2x

Austria:

complaint against Canadian troops, p. 107;

death rate, pp. 139, 214;

food rations, pp. 162, 170;

and Hoover's food relief, pp. 177-78;

mass graves, pp. 71, 124;

'transfer' of prisoners to, p. 83
Bad Kreuznach, pp. 214, 217;

prison camp, pp. 71, 73, 77, 78, 81
Baikal- Amur railway, lx
Balfour, A. J., lx

BAM line (Baikal- Amur railway), lx
Bavaria, lx
Behnke, Albert R., 2x
Beketovka (Gulag), lx
Belgium, p. 171:

and First World War blockade, pp. 36-38, 157;

and Second World War blockade, p. 109
Beria, Lavrenty, lx
Berlin, 5x
Berwick, Lee, 4x
Bevin, Ernest, lx
Biebelsheim (camp), lx
Birkenau (camp), lx
birthrates, pp. 134-137, 140,203
Bitter, Dr Margarethe, 6x
Bizone (feeding programme), lx
Blum, Leon, 161
Boehme, Kurt W., 3x
Bonhoffer, Dietrich, lx
Bonn, 3x
Brandenburg, lx
Braun, Harry G, lx
Brech, Martin, 2x
Bretzenheim (camp), 9x
Brilon, 3x
Britain:

accusations against USSR, p. 100;

archives, p. 107;

army reports p. 216;

diplomacy between wars, p. 47;

Britain (continuation):
food production, p. 163;
forced labour in, p. 84;
military power in 1945, p. 53;
official attitude to food parcels, p. 175;
post-war diet, p. 171;
power of, p. 51;
and re-education, p. 92;
relations with USSR, pp. 47-54;
Select Committee on Estimates, lx;
and White Russians, p. 97, 152;
British zone of Germany:

the death rate in, pp. 61-64, 138, 139, 216;

food rations in, pp. 131, 139, 162;

food relief in, pp. 172, 174;

refugees in, p. 135;

starvation in, pp. 61-64, 113, 115

Browder, Dewey, lx

Buchal, Rudi, 3x

Buchenwald camp, lx

Buglose-Labouheyre (camp), lx

Buisson, Louis, lx

Canada {see also King, Mackenzie):

aid to Britain, pp. 51, 115, 177;

army report on Brilon deaths, p. 138;

atomic secrets stolen, pp. 52, 187;

behaviour of troops in Austria, p. 108;

food production, p. 165;

and food relief, pp. Ill, 154, 158, 159, 161, 177;

and Nazi scientists, p. 150;

and re-education, p. 92;

refuses troops for south-east Asia, p. 5 1 ;

report of Legation in Warsaw, p. 208;

and USSR, pp. 48, 53, 151, 187
Canaris, Wilhelm, lx
cannibalism, lx
Canossa Republic, 3x
Capehart, Homer E., 2x
CARE Organization

(Co-operative for American Remittances to Europe), lx
CCE 27 (camp in France), pp. 73-75

censuses, pp. 134-137, 140-142;

omission of prisoners, pp. 223-224
charities, pp. 169-176
Chekhov, Anton, lx
Chichester, Bishop of, lx

children {see also infant mortality):

feeding programmes for, pp. 169-175;

Irish programme for, p. 174;

mortality, pp. 143, 161, 170;

orphaned, p. 174
China, 3x

Christian Century (magazine), lx
church, pp. 116, 149 {see also priests);

Catholic bishops (USA), p. 207;

Lutherans, p. 173
Churchill, Winston Leonard Spencer:

and Dutch famine, pp. 101-111;

First World War policies, pp. 36-38, 46;

and Katyn massacre, p. 96;

and Morgenthau Plan, pp. 56;

persuades Free Poles to return, p. 152;

on plot to kill Hitler, p. 149;

and USSR, pp. 48-54, 88, 183

civilians {see also expulsions):

estimated German deaths, p. 206;

information sources, p. 218;

prisoners in the USSR, pp. 98, 104
Clark, Mark, 4x
Clark, Ramsey, 2x
Clay, Lucius, 3x
Clayton, Will, 2x

coal mining, pp. 88, 90, 91, 115, 186

COBSRA (Council of British Societies for Relief Abroad), lx
Cold War, 5x

collective guilt, pp. 191-193
Cologne, lx

Combined Food Board, lx
Commission for Relief in Belgium, lx
Committee Against Mass Expulsions: see Land of the Dead
communism, pp. 40-41, 47

anti-Nazi resistance movement, p. 150;

and Hoover, pp. 40-43;

perceived threat from, pp. 52, 115

Conway, Granville, lx

Council of Foreign Ministers - 1947 meeting (CFM), 4x

CRALOG (Council of Relief Agencies Lie. for Oper. in Germany), 3x

CSSA (Central State Special Archive, USSR), pp. 94-108, 137, 219

currency reform, lx

Czechoslovakia, pp. 116, 142, 193;

expulsions and atrocities, pp. 119-121, 132-133
Darwin, Charles, lx
Davis, Norman, lx

death rates {see also starvation), pp. 128-44, 203-205, 214-18;
in Austria, p. 139;
in Berlin, p. 213;
in Brilon, pp. 138, 213;
in British zone, pp. 61-65, 138-9, 216;
of civilians, p. 206;

and expulsions, pp. 128, 129, 132-34, 141-44,207;
French statistics, p. 83;
in French zone, pp. 64, 217;
high estimates, pp. 129, 132;
low estimates, pp. 129-132;
mid-range estimates, pp. 129, 134;
1945-1946, p. 206;

prisoners of war, pp. 50, 78-83,99, 108, 114, 143,223;
in selected towns (1946-1950), p. 213;
in Soviet zone, pp. 131, 205;
summarised, p. 143;
in US zone, pp. 129-132, 139, 222-24;

DEF (disarmed enemy force) prisoners, lx

de Gaulle, Charles, 3x

Degwitz, Herr, lx

Dellmann, Max, lx

democracy, pp. 4x

Denmark, aid from, lx

Deutsche Caritasverband, lx

Deutsche Rote Kreuz, see under Red Cross

Dewey, John, lx

de Zayas, Alfred, 5x

Dietersheim camp, 3x

Dittersdorf, lx

Dole, Bob, lx

Donovan, William, lx

Doucet, Nelson, lx

Dulles, Allen, lx

Diisseldorf, lx

Dyck, Cornelius, lx

Dyck, Peter and Elfrieda, lx

dysentery, lx

Earle, Ambassador, lx

Early, Steve, lx

Ebensee (camp), lx

economy, European, 184

economy, German, 167, 180-81

Eden, Anthony, 2x

Einsiedel, Heinrich von, lx

Eisenhower, Dwight D., pp. 85, 189, 191;

death penalty order, pp. 69-72, 1 14;

and destruction of food, p. 1 14;

Eisenhower, Dwight D. (continuation):

forbids Quaker aid, p. 173;

and missing prisoners, pp. 83, 101-102, 130;

and Morgenthau Plan, pp. 55, 58
emigration: forbidden to Germans, p. 128;

from Germany (1946-50 statistics), p. 136

Enke, Siegfried, lx

European Court of Human Rights, lx

exports, German, 167, 183

expulsions, 59, 115-127, 134, 141, 168, 185, 193;

atrocities, 119-122;

condemned by Adenauer, 199;

death rates, 128-134, 141-143,207;

difficulties of feeding children, 174;

evidence for fate of expellees, 207;

from East of the Oder-Neisse line, 104;

numbers taken to the Gulag, 104;

opponents of, 145;

West's cover-up of, 198
factories, destruction of, 115, 167, 181, 185
fertilizer production: reduced by Allies, 111, 115, 166, 167
First World War, 36-42;

aftermath, 42-46, 146
fishing fleet, 2x
food rations, 62, 112, 114, 131, 139, 155, 162, 168, 170;

in Britain, 176;

in Canada, 159

food relief programmes {see also Hoover, Herbert), 154-63, 169-75;

blocked by Allies, 110, 167, 175;

for children, 169, 172-75;

First World War, 36-38
food supplies {see also Morgenthau Plan; starvation), 171;

Germans deprived of, 113, 165-68;

hoarding by farmers, 176;

imports, 115;

myth of world shortage, 59, 61, 143, 157, 163-66, 176;

problem of getting surpluses to the starving, 158, 162;

production drop in France and UK, 163;

urban shortages in 1947, 176;

in wartime Germany, 164, 167;

world production, 59, 163-66
Foreign Office (UK), 4x
France, 171;

conditions in camps, 58, 73, 83-86;

conditions in Vosges area, 75, 85 ccfx;

food production, 163;

government statistics, 129, 132;

France (continuation):

prisoner death statistics, 83;

refugees saved in, 126, 200
freedom of discussion, lx
French zone of Germany:

death rates in, 64, 217;

starvation in, 64, 113, 184

Freud, Sigmund, lx

Frings, Joseph, 2x

Furstbischofliche Knabenseminar, Graz, lx

Galbraith, John Kenneth, lx

Galitski, V. P., 2x

Garmisch-Partenkirchen (camp), lx

Geneva Convention, 6x

Germany (see also death rates; food relief programmes; Morgenthau

Plan; starvation):

agrees to food relief in Belgium, 110;

agricultural capacity, 166-68, 176, 217;

anti-American feeling, 185;

food shortages and starvation, 61-5, 112-16, 161-86;

government statistics, 128, 131, 135, 137-40, 213, 223;

history of anger against, 145-47;

industry, 114, 163, 166, 176, 181, 186;

land confiscations, 113, 117, 165, 192;

and Marshall Plan, 180;

post- 191 8 blockade of, 43-46;

post-1945 collapse, 112;

prewar food consumption and production, 164;

refugee numbers, 168;

relinquishes land claims (1990), 194;

and reparations, 114, 181-84, 195;

resistance movements, 148-53;

surveys of missing persons, 99-101, 221;

Weimar Republic, 42, 48
Gilbert, Martin, lx
Gimbel, John, 5x
Glogau, lx
Goebbels, Joseph, 2x
Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, lx
Gollancz, Victor, 2x
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 2x
Gouzenko, Igor, lx
Grasett, A. E., 2x
Graudenz (camp), lx
Greece, lx
Greer, Robert, lx
Grey, Lord (Edward), lx

Griiber, Probst, lx
Griinwald, Biirgermeister, lx
Guderian, Heinz, 4x
Gulag, 87-95;

economic viability of, 89-91;

and re-education, 91, 149

Gulf War, lx

Gummersbach, lx

Hamburg, 4x

Havel, Vaclav, lx

Heising, Johannes, lx

Henrys, General, lx

Hess, Rudolf, lx

Hilfs-AusschuB, lx

Hilfswerk der Evangelischen Kirchen in Deutschland, 3x

Hilldring, J. H., lx

Hitler, Adolf, 8x;

Hoover on, 176;

number of books on, 200;

persecution of churches, 179;

resistance to, 148-150

Holland, 171;

famine in, 109-112

Homma, Masaharu, lx

Hoover, Herbert, 110, 111, 198, 199;

ability and character, 43;

advises Truman, 65, 132, 155;

and anti-Semitism, 42;

and bolshevism, 40-43;

condemns Allies' policy, 50, 113;

and First World War relief programmes, 36-46, 157;

on Hitler, 176;

not remembered, 200;

post- 1945 food-relief programmes, 66, ch. 7: 154-178;

and relief of Dutch famine, 109-111;

on reparations, 181;

reports on conditions in Germany, 139;

on role of USA, 42-3

Hoover Aid (Ho over- Spend e), lx

Hoover Famine Emergency Commission, 2x

Hoover Institution, lx

Hopkins, Harry, 2x

hospitals:

camp units, 78-82;

evacuation, 78-82
hostage system, lx
Howard, Michael, lx

Huber, Max, lx

Hughson, Robert, lx

Hull, Cordell, 2x

Hunger Year {Hungerjahr), 2x

ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross), 4x

Indians, North American, lx

industry, German, 115, 163, 166, 176, 186;

factories dismantled, 115, 167, 181, 186
infant mortality {see also children), 2x
Inter-Allied Committee (1942 meeting), lx
International Historical Statistics, lx
Ireland, aid from, 174
Israel, lx
Italy, lx
Japan, 5x

Jehovah's Witnesses, lx
Johnson, Edd, lx
Johnson, Monroe, lx
Kaganovich, Lazar Moiseyevich, lx
Kaltenborn, H. V., lx
Karlsruhe, lx
Kashirin, Andrei L., 2x
Katyn (massacre), 3x
Kent, Martha {nee Schulz), lx
Keynes, John Maynard, lx
KGB, 3x

KGB accuracy (of records), lx
Kiel, 3x
King, Mackenzie, 154, 160-61, 171, 177;

against British domination, 51;

sends food to Greece, 111;

speech on 'law of peace, work and health' (1945), 54, 68;

on wheat prices, 159

Kirichenko, Alexei, lx
Kirsch, Joseph, lx
Kitchener, Lord (Horatio), lx
Klein-Mahlendorf, lx
Klosterbriick, 2x
Konigsberg, 3x
Krasnogorsk Gulag, 3x
Krefeld, lx
Kreider, Robert, 2x
Krische, Ernst Richard, lx
Krivosheyev, G. E., 3x
Kuttlau, lx
Labouheyre, lx;
archives, lx

labour: shortages (see also slave labour), 156, 157;
Lambach, lx
Lamsdorf, lx

land confiscations, 113, 117, 165, 192
Land of the Dead, The, 2x
Landau, 4x
Langenlonsheim, lx
Langer, William, 3x
Lauben, Philip S., 5x
Legouest hospital, lx
Le Monde (newspaper), 2x
Lenin, Vladimir llyich, lx
Life Magazine, 1 x
Littmann, Horst, lx
Lloyd George, David, 3x
Lorenz, Konrad, lx
Lorenz, Wilhelm, lx
Lossen, lx

Lowenstein, Prince zu, lx
Liibeck, lx
Luck, Hans von, lx
Ludwigshafen, lx
Lutheran Church, lx
MacArthur, Douglas, 2x
Mackenzie, William Lyon, lx
Magadan Gulag, lx
Maifritzdorf, lx
Maisky, Ivan, lx
Malik, Jakob, lx
Marburg, lx
Marburger Presse, lx
Marktoberdorf, 3x
Marshall, George C., 4x
Marshall, Jennings B., lx
Marshall Plan, 5x
Marxism, lx
Maschke, Erich, lx
media, p. 195

Medical History of the ETO (European Theater of Operations), 2x
Meehan, Patricia, lx
Mennonites, 6x
Middleton, Drew, lx
missing persons, 99-101, 143, 205, 221;
Japanese, 106

Mission Militaire de Liaison Administrative, 1 x
Mitchell, Brian R., 2x
Molotov.V. M., 2x
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, lx

Moltke, Helmut von, lx

Montgomery, Bernard Law, 2x

Morgenthau, Henry C, 5x

Morgenthau Plan, 55-61, 115, 140, 181, 186, 191;

US senators' opposition to, 59-61, 65-67
Miickusch, Hermine, lx
Miiller, Max, lx
Murphy, Robert, 137, 145, 166, 176;

estimate of number of expellees, 208;

estimates of German death rate, 130, 140-41, 203-06;

on omission of prisoners from censuses, 223-24;

protests against conditions caused by expulsions, 194
Nazis, 192;

local resistance to, 148-53;

scientists, 150
Neisse, lx
New York Times, 4x
Niederhermsdorf, lx
Niedersachsen, lx
Niemoller, Pastor Martin, 2x
nineteenth century, lx
Nitti, Francesco, lx

NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, USSR), 6x
North Rhine (province), lx
Nuremberg trials, 4x
O'Brien, Conor Cruise, lx
O'Grady, Gerald B., lx
oil, 52, 163, 167
OKW war diaries, lx
OMGUS (Office of the Military Governor, US), 182, 186, 222;

statistics, 129-32, 138, 139
'Other Losses', 83
Other Losses (Bacque), 5x
Overmans, Riidiger, 4x
Paris Peace Conference, lx
Patterson, Brad, lx
Patterson, Robert, 183;

efforts to prevent famine, 144-162, 170, 175;

on US food surpluses, 158-60, 165;

wish to release POWs from USA, 85
Paulus, Friedrich, 2x
Peron, Juan, lx
Peters, Herbert, lx
Petrov, Ivan, lx
Pfalz, lx

Phillimore Report, lx
Pichler, Fred, lx

Plemper, Franz- Josef, lx

Poland {see also Katyn massacre, Silesia):

disputed territories, 116, 193;

expulsions and atrocities, 49, 119-127, 142, 168, 208;

First World War aid to, 39, 41;

invasions (1939), 16, 17;

sacrificed by Allies, 24, 25;

USSR and, 47-53, 88, 116, 151
Polanyi, Michael, lx
Poles, Free, 152
Poles, Lublin, lx
Pope, Maurice, 2x
population, additions to, 205
postal service, lx
Potsdam agreements, 59, 116, 143, 151, 195;

Article XIII, 193;

condemned by Adenauer, 199
Potulitz / Potulice (camp), lx
Pradervand, Jean Pierre, lx
Pribram (raping), lx
Price, Waterhouse and Company, lx
prices: policies, 157-59;

rises, 176
priests, 133;

murder of, 127
prisoner of war camps:

conditions in French camps, 83, 99, 108;

conditions in US camps, 58, chapter 3, 1 14;

death statistics, 82-3, 99;

French takeover of US camps, 80-82, 103;

Gulag, 87-95, 149;

hospital deaths, 78-82;

in Poland, 124;

secrecy surrounding, 86;

three areas of death in, 78, 82
prisoners of war:

overall death rate, 50, 108, 114, 143;

death rate in US zone, 223;

First World War, 39-41;

France's treatment of, 65;

Japanese, 69, 92, 105-107;

from non-German Axis countries, 87, 101-03, 221;

numbers captured by Allies, 69;

numbers captured by Americans, 102;

omitted from census data, 223;

in Poland, 123-26;

release of Poles in 1941, 88;

prisoners of war (continuation):

Soviet statistics, 98, 102-105, 108, 123;

starvation of, 58, 69-78, 113 ;

surveys of, 98-101;

unaccounted for by US, 103;

White Russians, 97;
protest movement, anti-famine, p. 1 16
Proudfoot, Malcolm, 2x
public opinion, pp. 195-199
Quakers, 3x

Quebec Conference (1944), lx
Raabe, Herbert P., lx
rail-car shortage, US, p. 158
rape, 5x

Rasmus, Hugo, lx
Reckord, Milton A., lx
Red Army, 95, 104, 105;

acts of kindness, 126;

archives, 98, 101;

atrocities, 120-23, 127, 133;

reports, 219
Red Cross (see also ICRC):

German / Deutsche Rote Kreuz, 58, 62, 63, 169, 172;

International, 58, 84, 96, 108, 111, 132, 167;

Irish, 174;

Russian, 105;

surveys of camps, 222
Remagen (camp), lx
reparations, 3x

resistance movement, German: Allies' attitude to, 148-53
Rheinberg (camp), lx
Robertson, Norman, 4x
Rommel, Erwin, lx
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 65, 111, 157, 166, 192;

on destruction of German nation, 148;

and Katyn massacre, 96;

and Morgenthau Plan, 56-57;

opposition to Hoover, 155;

and Polish territory, 116;

and USSR, 49-54
Ruhr, lx

Russell, Bertrand, lx
Russell, Richard B., Jr, lx
Russia, see under USSR
Sack, John, lx
Sakhalin Island, lx
Saturday Night (magazine), lx

Save the Children Fund, lx

Scharf, Hanns, lx

Schenck, Ernst-Giinther, lx

Schlabrendorf, Fabian von, lx

Schleswig-Holstein, 2x

Schmidt, Kurt, lx

Schmitt, Paul, lx

school feeding programs, lx

Schulz, Martha, see under Kent, Martha

scientists, Nazi, lx

Second World War :

perceptions of, 190;

and West's alliance with USSR, 47-55, 95, 145, 151, 186

Select Committee on Estimates (UK), lx

self-determination, principle of, 2x

Sellner, William, lx

Seyss-lnquart, Arthur, lx

SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force), 4x

shipping, 59, 61, 111, 158;

crews, 136
Siegfriedt, Frederick, 73-75
Silesia {see also Poland), 117-122, 127, 133,214
slave labour, 114;

in France, 84;

in Poland, 124, 133;

in USSR (NKVD), 66, 89-91, 123, 134
Smith, Arthur L. Jr, 2x
Smith, Fred, lx
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 5x
Soviet Union, see under USSR
Soviet zone of Germany:

and agriculture, 217;

death rates, 131, 206;

starvation in, 113

spies: author and, 208-13;

conversion of Soviet prisoners into, 92;

ex-Nazis as, 150
Spietz, Herr and Frau Wolfgang, lx
Spira, Agnes, 2x
Stalin, Joseph, 52-3, 94-97, 150, 166, 220;

persecution of Mennonites, 179;

policy on prisoners, 89;

and Polish territory, 52, 117;

wartime public image, 49
Stalingrad, lx

starvation (see also food rations; food relief programmes; food
supplies; Morgenthau Plan)

in British zone, 61-64, 93, 96;

in French zone, 35-6, 1 12, 184;

in Germany, 61-64, 112-16, 161-86;

in Soviet zone, 113;

in US zone, 113
statistics: additions to population (see also death rates), 205;

death rate totals, 203-05, 214-18;

discrepancies, 82, 128-45;

fate of expellees, 207;

French, 83, 129, 132-33;

German civilian death rates, 205, 218;

individual towns, 213;

OMGUS (Office of the Military Governor, US), 129-32, 138-40;

omission of prisoners from censuses, 223;

post-war surveys, 221;

reasons for secrecy, 144-47;

sources, 205,215,218-20;

Soviet, 94-108, 137,219;

surveys of missing persons, 98-101, 221

Statistisches Bundesamt, 7x

Stauffenberg, Claus von, lx

Stettinius, Edward, lx

Stimson, Henry L., 3x

Stolper, Gustav, 6x

Strahov stadium, lx

Sudetenland (see also Czechoslovakia), 2x

Sweden, aid from, 168, 173, 175

Switzerland, aid from, 172-175

TB, see under tuberculosis

theft of goods, 167

Thirty Years' War, lx

Thomaswaldau (village), lx

Thompson, Dorothy, 2x

Tolstoy, Nikolai, 2x

totalitarianism, 35, 49, 187

Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, lx

Treaty of Versailles / Treaty of Trianon, 3x

Treitschke, Heinrich von, lx

Truman, Harry S., 149, 159-60;

arranges investigation into camps, 132;

enlists Hoover's help, 65, 66, 132, 154-57, 162;

keeps German prisoners in USA, 85;

lifts US price controls, 158;

and Marshall Plan, 180;

and reparations, 181;

response to protests about famine, 60, 65-66

tuberculosis (TB), 62, 161,217

Tullius, Otto, lx

typhus, lx

Ukraine, lx

unconditional surrender, 3x

United Kingdom, see under Britain

United Nations, 54, 151, 192, 195;

and Human Rights, 190, 194;

statistics, 136;

Third Committee, 100;

World Food Appraisal report (1946), 165

United States Public Health officers, lx

UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), 6x

USA:

aid to Britain, 5 1 ;

aid to USSR, 53, 151;

alliance with USSR, 49-54;

and disputed prisoner figures, 101-03;

food consumption, 163;

and food relief, 154-64;

food surpluses, 158-66;

forced labour in, 84;

military power in 1945, 53;

modern economy, 187;

and Nazi scientists, 150;

prison population, 188;

sympathy with Poland, 52;

threat from USSR, 52
US Army:

Adsec (Advance Section US Army), 82;

destruction of records, 222;

50th Field Hospital Detachment, 81;

560th Ambulance Company, 77;

handover of camps to French, 80-83;

Medical Officer, 139;

obstructs relief efforts, 175;

106th Division, 78-82;

PW and DEF reports, 82;

starvation of prisoners policy, 69-78
US Office of Foreign Agricultural Relations, lx
US Senate:

ignorance of US camps, 85;

opposition to Morgenthau Plan, 59-61, 65, 85
US State Department:

opposition to Hoover, 155, 162;

Factors Determining Russia's Interest in American Credits, 53;

and reparations, 181

US zone of Germany {see also OMGUS):

death rates, 129-32, 138, 139,223;

food relief in, 171, 174;

starvation in, 113
USSR {see also Gulag; Red Army; Soviet zone of Germany):

accuracy of prisoner records, 104-08, 137;

accusations of Allies against, 100-102, 106;

archives, 94-108, 137, 219-20;

conflicts with Britain, 5 1 ;

cooperation with Hitler, 47;

enforced repatriations to, 50, 97, 151, 152;

expansionism, 186;

expulsions policy, 141, 168;

and First World War, 39-40, 44-45;

Hitler's attack on, 48;

and Katyn massacre, 95-96, 147, 152;

need for Western aid, 53;

and Poland, 47-53, 88, 117, 151;

and reeducation, 88, 91, 149;

and reparations, 183;

threat to USA, 52;

uprisings against, 53;

West's alliance with, 47-55, 95, 146, 151, 186
Vienna, 2x
Vogel, Karl, lx
Volkogonov, Dmitri, lx
Vorkuta Gulag, lx
Walker, E. B., lx
war crimes, 7x
Weimar Republic, 2x
Weizsacker, Ernst von, lx
Wemyss, Rosslyn, lx
wheat, 5x

Wheeler-Bennett, John W., lx
Wherry, Kenneth, 2x
White Russians, 3x
Willis, F. Roy, lx
Wilson, Woodrow, 6x;

'14 Points', 2x
Yalta Conference, 2x
Yates, Jane, lx
Yeltsin, Boris, 2x
Zacher, Jakob M., lx
Zayas, see under de Zayas
ZentralausschuB zur Verteilung auslandischer Liebesgaben, lx

An Article written by James Bacque in Sept. 1989
on account of his publication of "Other Losses":